The Mask of Charity

Joseph Dana Miller

[Reprinted from The Arena, Vol. XXVIII, No.1, July 1902; pp. 258-273]

THERE are certain grave considerations with respect to charity, organized and unorganized, that need to be brought home to the minds and consciences of men. These considerations are rarely if ever given the attention they deserve. It is only the superficial aspects of the question that, in public addresses on the subject, in the publications of organized charities, and in popular appeals for subscriptions, seem to call for treatment. Political economy indeed has long recognized much of the futility of the entire program of charity; but political economy, handicapped as it is by medieval theories and irreconcilable dogmas of its own, is in no position to meet the claims of the protagonists of organized philanthropy.

Of course, charity's fundamental error is the idea that poverty can be cured or permanently alleviated by the giving of alms. The second error - which has included a partial abandonment of the first, and is in consequence a step in advance - is that habits of industry and frugality can or need to be taught by agencies organized in the name of charity, and poverty be thus relieved. There is, of course, a superficial sense in which both of these doctrines may be true, but considered apart from their relation to broader and more general truths one is as false as the other. For the answer to the first is that the giving of money tends on the whole to the perpetuation of poverty, and to the second that poverty does not spring from habits of indigence, from the inclination of the individual to embrace pauperism, nor from personal incapacity, but from the overwhelming circumstances in the world of industry.

A great deal of the effort put forth by charitable societies is expended in finding work for those out of employment. But how is it that men are out of work ? Is there not work requiring to be done as long as people want the things that work provides? In a primitive community the man who fells logs builds houses for the man who catches fish, and the work, or its fruits, is exchanged, or there is exchange of service. But observe that in such a primitive community one may go freely into the forest with his axe and the other cast his line in the stream with none to forbid them.

As communities develop from the primitive to the complex, the relations of the workers are changed in two ways: First, in the enormous increase in the relative productivity of labor. This is shown in the infinitely greater per capita wealth of the large as compared with the small community. The share going back to each of the workers should therefore be vastly greater. But the second change is that the wealth of the workers is now diverted to the coffers of the few - for it is the few who as communities increase take an ever-increasing share of the wealth. It is clear that there must be a kind of mysterious legerdemain at work, for it is the many, not the few, who make the wealth that flows into the lap of the few.

Now, the indictment against the professional charity worker is that he is deceiving himself, or, worse still, deceiving others, by assuming that charity is a remedy - that it is even a palliative. To ask contributions from the rich for the relief of poverty is, so far as such contributors are uninformed and the heads of charity organizations enlightened, to levy blackmail upon the unsuspecting.

An evidence of the futility of charity is the number and variety of the forms it takes. How multifarious and curious they are! - wood-yards, soup depots, free-milk stands, rummage sales, grab-bags, lotteries (in which the chances of getting anything for the investment are less than those favoring betting on the shadiest race-track in the country), one-cent coffee stands, slumming parties, bazaars, and so on ad infinitum. Generations of experiment, and experiments ever beginning anew ! Ingenuity taxed to its uttermost in the invention of devices to aid the needy without doing them or others some injury! Is it not time that charity indulged in some self-questioning?

The Associated Charities are doing a work, let us frankly admit, that seems to call imperatively for the doing. And yet - suppose it were left undone? We need not adopt that caricaturing of the evolutionary philosophy which demands that the unfit be left to perish and the fit alone to survive. For it is a hazardous question as to who are the fit ; independence of all charitable aid does not make a man fit to survive. The Associated Charities do not put the question in that form; yet it is not doubted that the ministrations of these organizations tend to the perpetuation of the mendicant and the impostor.

Why should mendicancy and imposture be preferred to a life of honest toil? I think I hear some one say, because these methods afford an easier living. It will seem strange to many to reply that such methods are arduous only to men of inferior capacity. For the world of imposture - all but the very lowest and meanest, and some even of that (of all imposture that is legally outlawed, I mean) - requires far higher intellectual, I had almost said moral, capacity for success than many departments of activity essentially respectable. Your successful impostor is a man of rare natural gifts, and of rarer acquirements. Immeasurably above the ordinary plodder must be the intellect capable of success in the world of imposture.

How comes it, then, that such men who could contribute to the store or service of society prefer these methods to those less criminal, or if not less criminal at least less perilous? We are told that their instincts are criminal; frequently the other class of rogues not outlawed tell us this. But the men whose instincts are criminal are rare indeed. Doubtless criminal heredity exists. The Jukes family is an instance in point; yet we have got to make enormous allowances for environment even when thinking of the Jukeses.

But such order of intellect presupposes the possession by the successful impostor of ordinary common sense, sufficient for the perception of the moral laws, - the consciousness of something abandoned, - which, at least at the outset, makes a man less in his own eyes. Now, some tremendous social fact - something outside of the individual himself - must induce to this sacrifice of principle ; and it is to be found in the conditions that strew obstacles in the path of the producer and make relatively smooth and easy of travel the way of the criminal. The charity organizations, with the problem forever pressing in upon them in a thousand forms, do not, for the sake of the interests with which their members are identified, seek a solution. So they content themselves with their diversions - playing at long-distance charity and seldom taking any chances at short range.

It is true, they talk of the "problems of charity." What do they mean by "problems" ? How comes it that that most exalted impulse -

"The sense of earnest will
To help the lowly living,
And a terrible heart thrill
If you have no power of giving,"

- should be associated with "problems"? Few charity workers ever stop to inquire. They do not mean the problem of poverty - poverty in a world of plenty - that is a problem indeed; not even the "solution" of charity for the problem of poverty - but actually the problem of how to give without injury. These are problems of charity and nothing else. But their constant presence never seems to teach anything to the people engaged in organized relief. Yet the phenomenon of increasing poverty with increasing charity should carry with it an apparent paradox to the thoughtful. Should not your charity worker, acquainted as he is with the hopelessness of his own task, be the one who more than all others should be in a position to proclaim the futility of his creed?

I had almost said that the main purpose of charity is to furnish a harmless vent for the innocent impulses of the thoughtlessly benevolent ; but I could not write thus when I reflect that charity is often a deliberate refuge for the conscience-stricken. Other good people there are, too, who imagine that the poor exist that the rich by their ministrations may secure salvation. God, being especially careful of the souls of the well-to-do, has provided the poor to stir them to pity, and to keep alive within them the higher Christian graces. I quote from the Rev. Wash- ington Gladden, writing in the Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1900. His language is a little guarded, but I think he means that - "The poor whose poverty is due to unpreventable sickness and unavoidable calamity will be with us to the end of time; we may lessen the causes which produce such poverty, but we shall not be able to abolish it altogether. We must relieve its distress, and this beautiful ministry to those in want and suffering will call forth the sympathy and kindness of the human heart so long as men live in the world." And he adds, almost joyfully, "The number of chronic dependents is increasing in all parts of the world."

Charity is the most beautiful word in the English tongue. Charity in its best exemplification is the highest exercise of a loving impulse - it is love in action. But charity without love, like faith without works, is dead. He gives nothing who gives according to formula. One cannot only practise charity - he must live it. "Charity saves from death," says Solomon; but organized charity is the very body of death.

Social conditions rob charity of its beauty and make it loveless; for charity is made to take the place of justice - a higher and more imperative and more exacting master of the social relations of men. Justice will not be denied. Let its claims be ignored and it will set Sisyphus-like tasks for those who refuse to heed its mandates. We deny justice, and that jealous taskmaster says to charity, "Then ye must do my work as well as the work that is more truly yours," and society turns to the fearful task only to find how impotent all its efforts are.

When there is real, pressing need of relief, organized charity finds itself helpless. When in the great industrial depression of a few years ago an agonized cry went up from New York's poor, the estimable rich who had played at charity organization found themselves powerless in the face of a great emergency. They did not know how to reach the poor. How indeed should they? Charity organization is a fad, just like society's dog shows and pink teas. Thus it was that the means of relief had to be turned over to the Salvation Army, which knew the poor by intimate contact - knew, therefore, whom to relieve and how to relieve them. It was a confession of utter failure - a revelation of how little of good even in normal times such organizations accomplish : how little of good, indeed ; but one hesitates to think how much of unsuspected evil!

Do we ever stop to think that charity has no place in the social relations of men - that it is not a public but a private virtue? There is no distress that society can be called upon to relieve as a matter of charity ; it owes such relief everywhere and at all times as a matter of justice. Every cripple, every imbecile, the halt, the sightless, have a claim upon society far removed from any considerations of charity. The great fund that arises with the growth of a community, and is represented in the value of land, is due also to their presence. Their actual or potential powers of production contribute to this value. The relief of these unfortunates is therefore one of the functions of government ; and for all the needs of government there is provided a natural fund, growing with its growth and responding to its every necessity. This raises all means for the relief of the unfortunate to the high plane of a providential dispensation. It would almost seem as if God had made this law for society, that society might not shirk its duty, nor - to put it somewhat coarsely - consider itself anything out of pocket by the operation.

In the blood-stirring conflict of the day, charity is a cowardly neutral. Organized charity is not even a Red Cross angel, since its ministrations are not personal, intimate, communicative. Where in the great industrial world brother strives with brother because he must, charity steps in with alms indeed, but with no words of condemnation for the system - only with infinite preachments at its annual meetings and in its annual reports ; with its rules and formulas for giving ; with formidable arrays of sponsors and contributors, presidents and secretaries; its deft appeals, first to the sentiment of the kindly disposed, and secondly to the fears of the well-to-do.

Intellectually and morally deteriorating is this playing at charity. Better far the hard, calculating bent of mind, urged and animated by a sense of unpitying justice, than this toying with a great problem, this skimming the social surface for novelty, this wetting of dainty feet in idle dalliance in the great deep.