436 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thropic enterprise. Proof on this point would be overwhelming 

 were we to take the necessary space to present it. One has only 

 to go through the annual reports of the New York State Board of 

 Charities and read the exposures that have repeatedly been made 

 of the state of affairs on the islands of the East River and in the 

 county almshouses of the State to satisfy himself that were the whole 

 burden of supporting the pauper population of this Commonwealth, 

 and especially of this city, thrown upon the public, private enter- 

 prise withdrawing from the competition, the appropriations men- 

 tioned by Mr. Coler would sink into ridiculous insignificance by 

 comparison. The appropriation of public money to private insti- 

 tutions has become a scandalous abuse, but we shall never under- 

 stand its strength until we frankly face the fact that the public has 

 been experimenting with it, hoping thus to find a way of escape from 

 the greater abuses that attend the administration of public relief 

 by public agencies except when they are incessantly watched and 

 held up to the broadest light of publicity by the disinterested efforts 

 of private citizens. 



The omission of this side of the matter from Mr. Coler's discus- 

 sion may perhaps be regarded as a mere failure to deal with the 

 whole of a very large and difficult problem. But it is more than 

 a mere omission; it is, I think, a positive error, and a serious one, 

 into which the comptroller falls when he lays as much stress as he 

 does upon the expenditure, for salaries and wages, of a large propor- 

 tion of the sums appropriated by the city for private institutions. 

 The real question here, as all sound experience has repeatedly dem- 

 onstrated, is not whether the expenditure is for salaries in general 

 rather than for relief. This Mr. Coler practically admits when he 

 says that a great deal of money spent for relief is worse than wasted, 

 because it fosters pauperism instead of repressing it, and when, at 

 the close of his article, he says that he found it necessary to create 

 in his department a bureau to investigate the character of institu- 

 tions asking aid. This is a frank confession that the expenditure of 

 money for salaries or for wages may be wiser than its expenditure 

 in relief, provided the salaries or wages are earned in actual inves- 

 tigation, which results in exposing fraud and preventing expendi- 

 tures on improper applicants. This is the very kernel of the whole 

 matter, whether it is a private or a public administration of charity 

 that we are considering. The use of money, public or private, for 

 the payment of salaries that are mere sinecures is dishonesty pure 

 and simple, and neither the comptroller nor any of those private 

 organizations that make it their business to watch and criticise ad- 

 ministration can have a more imperative duty than that of putting 

 an end to such corruption. But, on the other hand, there could be 



