ALTRUISM ECONOMICALLY CONSIDERED. 65 



What, then, must we do ? Fortunately, our altruistic feelings 

 may be gratified in a manner not harmful to the beneficiaries. 

 Robert Treat Paine, of Boston, who has had large experience in 

 treating the poor, prescribes the following: "Whenever any fam- 

 ily has fallen so low as to need relief, send to them at least one 

 friend — a patient, true, sympathizing, firm friend— to do for them 

 all that a friend can do to discover and remove the causes of their 

 dependence, and to help them up into independent self-support 

 and self-respect." To which it may be added, if that friendly vis- 

 itor is permitted to give alms, his and their minds are diverted 

 from the great object — the permanent cure of poverty. It should 

 always be regretted when circumstances seem to demand attention 

 to immediate needs. Put off every possible want till the person 

 can himself supply it in a manly and independent way. Better a 

 morsel with self-respect than plenty with an enfeebled determi- 

 nation to fight the battle of life. 



II. Orphan Asylums. — Much that has been said of giving alms 

 applies to the treatment of delinquent and dependent children. 

 Moved by the altruistic spirit, and feeling an approving con- 

 science as the result of trying to do good to others, the Christian 

 world has taken up the care of orphan asylums. Children are 

 gathered from the slums of cities, and sometimes from pretty good 

 homes, in to these herding-places. Then they are told, as I heard 

 from a reverend doctor, how grateful they should be to Christian- 

 ity for thus caring for them ; but the fact again is that, prompted 

 by kind motives, people thus try to do these children good with- 

 out looking to the results of their acts to see the consequences. 



What, then, are some of these consequences ? 



1. That moral corruption, brought in a little by each child, 

 leavens the whole lump. 



2. That they are often placed under incompetent teachers to 

 learn book-lessons, when in fact their capacities call for manual 

 training instead. (Who ever knew a scholar reared in an orphan 

 asylum ?) 



3. They are fed in the cheapest sort of a way, and clothed in a 

 uniform that causes them to be pointed out always in public as 

 objects of charity and degradation. 



4. They are kept in herds and not in families, and hence subject 

 to rules and training necessitated by this abnormal life. Often 

 they are so unfit to live in families that kind-hearted people can 

 not adopt them. 



5. Every delinquent mother and every drunken father now 

 knows that he and she can indulge their vices and get rid of their 

 children. Thousands of widowed mothers, learning that they can 

 marry again if not encumbered with children, are putting their 

 little ones in asylums. The asylum thus offers a premium to child- 



VOL. XXXIT. 5 



