68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



preparing to lead lives devoted to altruistic work, and that it was 

 therefore desirable, in the case of young men apparently without 

 means, to pay their expenses in theological schools, but it worked 

 so badly that the plan is undergoing change. In the best schools 

 where funds are provided, they are now loaned, and a written obli- 

 gation to repay is executed. In other words, the managers of 

 schools of divinity found out that to give to the poor theological 

 student was to lend to the devil — a very different creditor from 

 the one they had in mind ! It was found that this money got used 

 at times for tobacco, for pleasure-trips, etc., while board-bills were 

 unpaid, and that after it was spent the beneficiaries sometimes 

 abandoned the life-work they had contemplated.* But even the 

 loan system is not working satisfactorily. The written obligation 

 is often lightly esteemed, and held to be not binding. The writer's 

 latest information is that but thirty per cent is paid back. Only 

 when the notes are looked after, as a successful banker looks 

 after his paper, will the system become truly beneficent. It will 

 then have ceased to be a charity. Again let it be said, do not give 

 something for nofJiing, but, if you really must do so, then put it 

 into a lottery, 



VI. Gifts to Workingmen. — There is reserved for the last a 

 notice of the most contemptible form of altruism now known to 

 civilization. It has come to be the fashion for people who have 

 acquired money without giving an equivalent in labor and who 

 wish to indulge in benevolence, to build mission-chapels in out- 

 skirts of cities, and to furnish them with cheap appliances in or- 

 der to "save the souls" of the dear working-classes. Another 

 form this takes is in furnishing workingmen libraries and read- 

 ing-rooms, and even in building improved tenement-houses. In a 

 score of ways the rich are " doing something for the poor." Now, 

 all these things have the same surface appearance of charity as 

 throwing a dime to a beggar. But the fact is, that these people 

 have by class legislation or dishonesty got possession of wealth 

 created by the poor, and in order to quiet their little consciences, 

 or occasionally in order to enable them to keep up the fraud, they 

 dispense these charities. 



Now, let it be reported to all such that the workingmen need 

 none of their charities. They cry out for justice, for fair wages 

 for a day's work, for reasonable rents, for a chance to buy house- 

 lots which speculators have not pushed beyond honest men's reach 

 — in short, for such a reorganization of legislation and custom as 

 will enable them to labor and to administer upon the entire fruits 

 of their labor, to build and furnish their own chapels if they 



* There has been in government employ in Washington, the past eight years, a young 

 man who received such aid for two years previously. He now owns real estate in Wash- 

 ington, but he never preaches. 



