The very first direct result of the growing consciousness of conditions throughout the country is a sudden growth in the volume of money to charity, and a sudden and quite extraordinary increase in the personal interest shown by the wealthy in the matter of reform.  
It is natural that this should be so. In every nation, in all periods of history, it has been true. Sometimes this impulse toward charity and reform, which grows out of real personal study of the problems of poverty, goes very far toward saving a nation from ruin. No student of political economy can afford to ignore this impulse toward charity, and sweep it away as most thoughtless writers to-day are inclined to sweep it away, as though it were merely a conscious effort on the part of the rich to buy their way into the kingdom of heaven, to escape the accusing finger of the poor, and to avoid the payment of a debt to humanity long . One must recall that, in the twenty years from 1742 to 1762, an impulse toward charity, based really on conditions very similar in their nature to our own, went far toward saving the nation of England from almost certain ruin. The rich at that time had religion, had into far deeper and far more general than the wealthy classes in the United States to-day, and come to at purity and to the marriage , and openly boasted of their . The poor, on the other hand, had sunk to depths of ignorance and absolutely unknown in this land of ours. The tremendous growth of manufacturing towns was the cause that widened the between these two classes. It was, in fact, exactly our phenomenon, differing only in degree. Society had come to live in deadly fear of the masses, so that the books of the land were filled with laws death upon the poor for the most trivial of offences. It was a capital crime to cut down a cherry-tree; it was a capital crime to steal.
 
Mark well the sequel: Society was forced in its own defence to begin the study of the problem of wealth and poverty. Men and women who, through all their earlier years, had been carefully and trained to regard the poor as a different species, and to look with scorn and upon their suffering, went into the streets of the industrial cities to learn. Ministers of God who had seen their churches empty year by year went out into the lanes and of England to seek their flock. Hence sprung Whitfield and John Wesley, and hence the Methodist Church, which, whatever any one may think of its , could have its existence in the world by the work it did in the first twenty years of its lifetime.
 
A very little later, as a result of this same impulse of charity, growing out of a fight for life on the part of the higher classes, Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, founded in England his system of Sunday schools, the very beginning of popular education. Hannah More, a noble woman of the time,173 devoted the better part of her life to laying bare the horrible conditions of agricultural labour. Out of the same movement came Clarkson and Wilberforce with their tremendous anti-slavery campaign that was in the end to lead England to a peaceful if expensive . Before that era John Howard was a quiet country gentleman, wealthy and happy, and blindly ignorant of poverty and crime. At the end of it he took his place at the top of the list of the world’s great reformers; and the prisons of England, from that day to this, have never sunk to the depths of ignominy and shame in which they lay when John Howard first was moved to study them. Hospitals sprang up all over the land. Organized charity began in England. The poor of England, from that day to this, have at least been considered174 human beings, instead of beasts that perish.
 
Therefore, let me repeat, it is to dismiss the present tendency toward charity and reform as if it were mere time-serving. It may be, indeed, that it is one of the greatest economic facts in America to-day. It may be that, as it spreads and grows and brings into the battle thousands upon thousands of devoted men and women, hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth, social reform upon social reform, it will act as a check and an to the tremendous industrial discontent that is spreading over the country. It may be that, as in England, it will bridge the between the rich and the poor, or, at the worst, prevent its widening to the point of open war.
 
I hesitate to undertake any extensive review of the great charities and reforms that have sprung out of this new impulse that has moved the rich to study the poor. I hesitate not because there is of material, but because of my own knowledge. I know that the facts of record are but a very small part of all the facts in the case. The tremendous benefactions of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Mrs. , do not begin to measure the organized and unorganized charities that have been inaugurated by the wealthy within the past ten years.
 
Personally, I do not think very much about the forms of charity that are to-day most prevalent amongst the wealthy. Millions of dollars every year are poured indiscriminately into all sorts of hoppers here in New York, in the vain hope that they will help to bring about better conditions. Money-charity, if I may call it so, seems to me a beautiful thing if it is really done in a spirit of helpfulness—but, , how vain it is! I do not know but that, in the case of more than half the of charity of this indiscriminate sort, it does more harm than good. This I do know, that, according to the best estimates obtainable, from eighteen per cent. to twenty-five per cent. of the people of New York State accept charity every year. This is a matter of record. How many more are the recipients of unrecorded charity I do not know, but I should not be surprised if forty per cent. of the population of the greatest state of the union are the beneficiaries of charity, of one sort and another, in such a year as 1908, for instance.
 
Professor Bushnell, in an estimate made177 some years ago, estimated that nearly two hundred million dollars a year was spent upon the maintenance of abnormal dependents in the United States. Think, then, of the amount of money that must be upon the thousand and one indiscriminate charities extended to people who cannot be classed as dependents at all.
 
Charity, beautiful as it is in many instances, is a hopeless answer to the questions of the day. The wonderful growth of it in the past three or four years in the social world to which I belong is hopeful, not because of the actual good it has or can accomplish, but simply because it is another index of the times, another indubitable sign that the wealthy men and women of Society are really throwing their hearts and minds into the problem of adjusting the relationship178 between the classes which are so rapidly drifting apart.
 
Of all the charities I know, I think that the , the most far-sighted, and the most surely pregnant with good is the Sage Foundation. Perhaps my opinion is little more than . I myself have given so much time and effort to studying the causes of the growth of poverty in this country that perhaps an institution founded with a tremendous fund of money behind it to carry on an exhaustive and scientific research into the causes of poverty strikes me as the most intelligent of all the charities I have ever seen, merely because it fits in with my own personal ideas, and is the very charity I myself would have founded had I had the toward charity and the means to put it into effect.
 
I cannot speak with authority of the179 actual work that the Sage Foundation is doing; but I fancy, if one could to-day take an of actual results accomplished, he would find that the foundation has barely been begun, and that these artisans of the have not yet even tentative plans for the superstructure. I have, however, read with extreme interest a report made by the trustees as the result of an of the living conditions in families in New York City, and I do not hesitate to say that, in the of that report alone, the Sage Foundation has accomplished a work of great practical utility.
 
People of my class, when they read a book, seldom write to the author and give him their impressions. In all human probability the compilers of this report do not know whether any one in the wealthy class180 of New York Society has read the book. I can assure them that it has been excellently read. One night, in a company of about a dozen, I mentioned it. All but two in the party had read extracts from it in the newspapers, two had read it in full for information, and one raised a laugh by saying that his secretary had tried in vain to buy it at four book stores.
 
This work, in my opinion, will bear a tremendous crop of fruit. We need facts, and we need them very badly. , we are afraid of such estimates as those contained in Mr. Robert Hunter’s “Poverty,” full as it is of vague, loose, and statements, academic estimates in round millions, and glittering generalities of all sorts. We cannot find knowledge in the libraries, for we distrust the Socialist propaganda intensely. We181 must have , clear, dispassionate analysis of the situation, or we shall stumble blindly on as we are stumbling to-day, wasting our millions on foolish charities, debauching honest men and women by unnecessary gifts, to laziness, and actually increasing in this land of industry the army of dependent . I hope that the time will come when the Sage Foundation will be, as it were, a guiding light upon the sea of charity.
 
I can hardly pass from this subject without a word of praise for the work in behalf of the public health. The active, intelligent labour of such men as Professor Irving Fisher on the propagandist side, and Doctor Flexner and Doctor Stiles on the practical side, cannot be praised too highly. It is made possible by charity. Both Messrs. Rockefeller and Morgan, admittedly182 two of the greatest of our capitalists, have given millions to this work. Every year other uncounted millions pour into it from men and women in every city i............