The Danish Pension System.

The Danish system is rather a poor law than a pension law, but as a poor law it seems to be a thoroughly sane and statesmanlike measure. It divides the poor requiring State aid after the age of sixty into the deserving and the undeserving; and it includes in the former class all "who are unable to maintain themselves, who have been in the country ten years, have never been convicted of crime, and can prove that they have not received poor law relief or been convicted of vagrancy or begging for ten years, and that their poverty is not the page 3 result of extravagance or evil living." On the applicant satisfying the local authority on all these points he is placed in the deserving class, and is awarded a pension of an amount which is left to their discretion. Sixteen guineas a year, or about 6s 6d a week, is said to be the largest amount awarded in Copenhagen. The undeserving are left to the workhouse. As I have said, this is really poor law and not pension law; but it is a poor law placed upon a sound and discriminating basis, and its essentials should be imitated in any scheme which, by making poverty a necessary qualification of its so-called pensioners, will merely amount to indiscriminate outdoor relief unless accompanied by adequate means for excluding the grossly unwortny.