26 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
whose names have long been hidden under the dust of ages, and 
whose tardy recognition must in some cases dethrone other men, 
to whom their good deeds have been appropriated. 
I am not without hopes that the retrospect, by no means wholly 
satisfactory, may have its value also in emphasizing the present 
need of widespread reform in relation to our endowed Charities. 
One point upon which I would lay special stress is the evidence 
afforded of the need for an extension of the principle of the Mort- 
main Acts, to the prohibition of the locking up of any real property 
in charitable endowments. The only charitable freeholds sanc- 
tioned should be those of lands or houses absolutely in possession 
and use. Not only is the contrary course, as I believe, opposed to 
the welfare of the nation, but (and this chiefly concerns us here) 
it has been a fruitful source of neglect and fraud. The interests 
of Charity property have, as a rule, been nobody's interests ; decay 
and dilapidation have been suffered unchecked; tenants have 
turned leases into freeholds ; trustees have fulfilled the letter of 
their trusts and pocketed the unearned increments; neighbours 
have encroached, and bit by bit nibbled away field after field ; rent 
charges have been withheld because it has been known that the 
Charities to which they belonged were too poor to fight. From all 
these causes the Plymouth Charities have suffered. 
Under the head of our Older Charities I include all those estab- 
lished among us prior to the end of the seventeenth century. Nor 
is the line thus drawn a purely arbitrary chronological limit. It 
comprises, not only Charities of which the origin has been lost in 
antiquity, but the whole of the charitable work of that great 
Puritan age, which is the most glorious period in the history of 
Plymouth. The century between the accession of Elizabeth and 
the death of Cromwell is the proudest epoch of our corporate life. 
Throughout that hundred years, with hardly an exception, our 
mayors were men of mark, and our "twelve and twenty-four" 
sturdy burghers, who respected the rights of other people, and who 
jealously maintained their own. Of the threescore mayors who by 
turns held chief sway in Plymouth during this period, there were 
not a dozen who did not enter more or less heartily, and in no 
formal manner, upon undertakings of pure benevolence — building 
hospitals for the poor, asylums for the orphan, almshouses for the 
aged j feeding the hungry, clothing the naked ; finding work for 
the unemployed, capital on easy terms for the struggling tradesman, 
