Problems of a Great City
White, Arnold
1887
THE annual revenue of the metropolitan charities is greater than the whole of the expenditure in , on maintaining royalty, the administration of justice and foreign affairs, Army and Navy, internal, educational, and ecclesiastical affairs, and in providing interest on the Swedish debt. It is difficult to say whether in the long run the community would be benefited or prejudiced by the complete and immediate stoppage of all charitable subscriptions to benevolent societies. On the one hand, acute suffering would be caused to individuals, though the death of many of the unfit would be advantageous to succeeding generations. Large | |
246 | bodies of clerks, secretaries, and salaried administrators would be thrown out of employment, but the money employed in paying them would be available for more useful objects. Looking to the large sums expended in London charities, and to the amount of distress ascertained to exist, it is probable that the money actually provided is more than sufficient to meet the necessities of those who are proper subjects for the exercise of private charity. |
The defects in the present system of charitable administration are three in number: | |
(1) the competition raging between weak institutions carrying on similar work with separate machinery; (2) the enormous sums wasted in administrative expenses and advertisements; (3) the absence of any palpable relation between charitable work and endowment and their effects on the solution of the social problem, and therefore on the welfare of the community. Take, for example, the sum of £312,000 a year which is expended on institutions for General Relief. No doubt much individual misery is temporarily relieved. The other side of the picture lies in the | |
247 | wholesale destruction of the sense of parental responsibility for the physical and mental welfare of children brought into the world, and the creation of confirmed habits of dependence on charitable doles in a class increasing its numbers with greater rapidity than the independent and self-supporting classes from which the bone and sinew of the nation are recruited. |
With regard to the competition between charitable institutions pursuing identical aims, the evil is not so great. The mere waste of money, and the prostitution of a sacred idea, exhibited in the profane avidity with which rival institutions clamour for public help are not matters of national importance. Take, for example, the twenty-six charities for the Blind, costing £55,677 a year. It is impossible not to believe that improved administration, greater economy, and increased usefulness would result from a fusion between the different interests, conducted on lines precisely similar to those followed in the case of Railway or Insurance Companies, where the proprietory is bent on effecting an amalgamation between rival interests. | |
Or take the £108,470 a year spent on twenty-nine miscellaneous special hospitals. It is difficult for a layman to understand what advantage can accrue to the communitywhatever may be the effect on the interests of individual specialists-in the multiplication of the existing hospital system by miscellaneous special hospitals issuing separate appeals to the public for support. It should be explained that besides the seventeen General Hospitals, commanding the support of the charitable, there are eight Consumption Hospitals, five Ophthalmic, three Orthopedic, three Skin, twenty-one for Women and Children, and six Lying-in Hospitals. In addition to these, twenty-nine miscellaneous hospitals, to which objection is taken, are instituted for the most part with special reference to the diseases of particular organs, which can be as efficiently, and certainly more widely and economically, studied and treated in a large General than in a small Special hospital. The medical profession have deserved so well, and have received so little from the community, as compared with the legal and the clerical professions, it is somewhat invidious | |
249 | to venture on suggestions for the reorganization of a portion of the existing medical machinery of the metropolis. The first and almost the special point in which civilization contrasts with barbarism, consists in the tenderness and care bestowed on infirm, unfit, and undesirable lives, tainted with disease or maimed with deformity. Whether on the whole the results of applying medical science to the maintenance and preservation of the unfit, and of improving the sanitary conditions of daily life, are, or are not, on the whole advantageous to the community, need not here be discussed. The compassionate feelings of the wealthier classes lead them to subscribe nearly £ 600,000 a year for the benefit of ninety-two hospitals in the metropolis. The question is therefore whether a federation could not be established between the administrations of separate mechanisms for identical objects, with the view of dispensing from time to time with certain hospitals where the work can be carried on as efficiently and more economically in larger institutions. |
The subject of charities cannot be touched | |
250 | without reference to those semi-fraudulent institutions conducted primarily as a means of existence for their promoters, and not for the relief of the poor. Under the present system any letter or advertisement in the daily papers, or a circular to the public appealing for funds for charitable purposes, may be inserted or issued without let or hindrance. The law intervenes only in the event of the mal-administration of such funds, attracting sufficient public attention to demand investigation and inquiry under the Ciminal Law. So numerous are these appeals, that the time has arrived when no one should be permitted to make a public appeal for charitable funds without being subjected to the ordeal of a Public Audit. |
The multiplication of week institutions seems not unlikely to receive greater impulse during the jubilee year of Her Majesty's reign. It were to be desired that that historic event could be perpetuated by the rearrangement and concentration on scientific principles of the funds obtained, and of the institions already in existence, rather than by extraction of more funds | |
251 | from the public pocket, and by the erection of additional institutions for the purpose of doing that which is already being one in other quarters. |
The need for charity shoudl diminish from the hour that the Problems of a freat City begin to undergo the process of solution. The poor we have awlys with us. By the continuity of their existence is no ground for making systems of relief the instruments for propogating pauperisms, destroyng thrift, relieving parents for their duties, and generally subsidising the powers of darkness. Objectively considered, the existence of two or more charitable agencies occupying the same ground at the same time, is as irrational as if numberous water companies were to engage in the supply of water to a sinalge street. Either harmonious concert must exist between rival charities-which notoriously is not the case - or some of the objects of charitiable relief will be neglected, and others will be superfluously assisted. impliues by the ambition of it stitle that it has undertaken the task of welding duplicate undertkaings. | |
252 | pruning exuberant energies, and mapping out the areas in which the force of disciplined generosity can usefully expend itself. Grappling with a task of enormous difficulty, it is not surprising that the Society for the Organization of Charitable Relief has neither equalled the intentions nor adhered to the ideal of its founders. Through evil report it has, however, steadily pursued with English tenacity one of the objects with which it was founded, although the public mind is confused by the incongruity of its functions. One would think that an organization created to arrange and marshal disunited energy, would refrain from itself competing as a relief agency with the very societies it proposes to organize. Weighty and experienced minds are associated with the Society for the Organization of Charitable Relief, and to them the public may fairly look for a new departure in the direction indicated by the title of the Society. Mansion House Local Committees have shown that in times of distress religious and political animosities can be laid aside under the pressure of public calamity, and under the influence of a common |
253 | sympathy. Permanent charitable committees might well be organized by whom not only the administration of charitable relief should be undertaken within the area allotted for their operations, but from whom should proceed a permanent stream of appropriate criticism of the local authorities when neglect or corruption are shown to exist. It has been already shown in the case of the Emigration Societies how puerile and wasteful is the system of numerous disunited and feeble efforts. The circumstances detailed in the case of the Emigration Societies apply to many other forms of charitable endeavour. Preliminary to better administration, must be intelligent contact between the various circles of charitable influence. The English public is compassionate as a woman when its emotions are really stirred. But the essence of the problem of administering the immense revenue annually raised removes the question from emotional to intellectual regions. That which is required, therefore, is the continuous application on the spot of the same class of mind to the charitable problem, as is bestowed on the building and command of our ships; |
254 | on the administration of our railway system, the economical and successful conduct of the complex operations of a large and successful business. Getting in the money is the smallest factor in the problem. Spending the results obtained by frantic appeals without inflicting actual harm on the next generation is a matter of the greatest difficulty, and has not hitherto, as a rule, been undertaken by persons of a calibre comparable with that possessed by those who succeed in business or professional life. The principal qualification of a charitable functionary is often held to be the adroitness with which he relieves the public of its cash, rather than the skill and success with which the cash is expended. Such functionaries are sometimes remunerated in part by receiving a commission on the money they succeed in obtaining from the public ; a policy which taints charity with the sordidness of commerce without imparting the shrewdness and ability characteristic of the tradingclasses. |
Pestered, tormented, and badgered by the practised wiles of paid philanthropists, the charitable public are beginning to perceive | |
255 | that the subtle aroma of charity itself is prone to disappear before arriving at its destination. Impatience with the present system is on the increase. People who would give generously, if they were sure that their bounty would be effectual in doing good, refrain from giving because their taste and intellect revolt against the vulgarity of the appeals with which their support is demanded. |
Personal contact between the giver and the object of his compassion is the only effectual method of replacing the system of charity by cheque-which is often no charity at all-at all events, to posterity. People sometimes dissipate their charities by giving a guinea here and a guinea there, when the concentration of a year's benevolence on one object might remedy an evil otherwise permanent and prolific. Sorrow and misery in the mass are essentially subjects for intellectual and practical, and not for emotional treatment. The sorrow or misery of a friend, on the other hand, is the subject for personal and sympathetic sacrifice. Much of the muddle into which charitable administration has fallen is the result of confusing two opposite ideas. | |
256 | As the command of a ship or a regiment cannot be carried on by love and emotion, so the disciplined administration of charity in the mass can only be conducted successfully by rigid adherence to the fundamental principles of inexorable law. Neglect of such principles as the inviolable sanctity of parental responsibility; the justice of permitting free play to the natural consequences of criminal indolence; the effect on an innocent posterity of the fecundity of the unfit; and the essential differences between the province of natural law and the province of charity or gospelhas plunged the community into a slough of despair, under which the enormous sums annually provided for charitable purposes are not only making no inroad on the troubles of our race, but are instrumental to their perpetuation, by the subordination of generous, but untutored, emotions to the interests of a paid and blundering philanthropy. |
