722 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



entitled Abuse of Public Charity, by Comptroller Bird S. Coler; 

 and that by Prof. Franklin H. Giddings, of Columbia University, 

 on Public Charity and Private Vigilance. The community whose 

 capable and efficient servant he is has reason to be thankful that, 

 in the person of a public official intrusted with such large respon- 

 sibilities, it has a thoughtful and far-seeing student of problems 

 whose grave importance he has so opportunely pointed out. It 

 needs the courage and the knowledge of such a one to affirm that 

 "it is easier for an industrious and shrewd professional beggar 

 to live in luxury in New York than to exist in any other city in 

 the world," which, if any social reformer or minister of religion or 

 mere critic of the social order had said it, would probably have 

 been denounced as an atrabilious and unwarranted exaggeration. 



Concerning the comptroller's indictments of certain charitable 

 societies and organizations as expensive mechanisms for the con- 

 sumption of appropriations or contributions largely spent upon their 

 salaried officials, I am quite willing to recognize the force of Pro- 

 fessor Giddings's demurrer to the effect that a so-called charitable 

 society may now and then rightly exist, and expend its income 

 largely, if not wholly, upon the persons whom it employs as its 

 agents, since these agents are the vigilant committees whose office 

 it is to detect, discourage, and expose unworthy objects, whether 

 of public or private charity. But that, besides such agencies, there 

 are constantly called into being wholly spurious organizations, 

 which profess to exist for the relief of certain classes of sufferers 

 or of needy people; that these succeed, sooner or later, in fas- 

 tening themselves upon the treasury of the city and of the State; 

 and that they are, in a great many cases, monuments of the most 

 impudent and unscrupulous fraud, there can be no smallest doubt. 



Well, it may be asked, What are you going to do about it? 

 Will you accept the inevitable evils that march in the rear of all 

 public or private charity, or will you sweep all the various agencies, 

 which have relieved such manifold varieties of human want and 

 alleviated to such an incalculable degree human misery, out of 

 existence? Will you care to contemplate what a great city like 

 New York or London would be if to-morrow you closed the doors 

 of all the hospitals, creches, homes of the aged, asylums for the- 

 crippled, the blind, the insane, and the like, and turned their in- 

 mates one and all into the street? 



That is certainly a very dramatic alternative to present; but 

 suppose that we look at it a little more closely. And, in order that 

 we may, I shall ask my reader to go back with me, not to that 

 primitive or barbaric era to which I began by referring, but only 

 to a somewhat earlier stage in our own social history, with which- 



