Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/505

Rh the theory of punishment for persons of mature years, there can be but one opinion with reference to the duty of the State to these, its wards and weaker members.

The Department of Charities and Corrections in New York city is controlled by three commissioners, who have under their charge some six hundred employés and about twelve thousand dependents. As is justly complained of in the above official report (see pp. 289-291), the appointment of the commissioners is part and parcel of municipal patronage, and it is declared that the whole tendency of the system is to encourage the increase of pauperism and crime. It is estimated that over seven millions of money are spent annually by public and private organized charity in New York city alone; yet improvidence and dependence remain exactly as the year before. The report of the public charities of that city is a startling document; it shows how much misery is due to a lavish, unsystematic, and misapplied benevolence. In speaking of the money expended by out-door relief societies, to the number of sixty-six, the report says:

Thus we have an aggregate of $546,832 spent in this kind of charity in New York city during the year 1880; $157,610 of this sum being public money, while about 525,155 cases are reported as having received one form or another of charitable relief...The foregoing figures, whether we regard them from a financial or humanitarian view, are sufficient to convince us that so important a business as the administration of charity in New York city requires to be carried on on business principles, if the great evils of wasted funds and corrupted and pauperized citizens are to be avoided. Some system is required to enable these various societies to work in harmony... That there is not some such system in New York is a matter of regret...to most thoughtful persons who have practical experience, especially as almost all other large cities in this country and in England have proved the value of associated work in diminishing pauperism and poverty in their midst.

In the interesting report for 1884, the Committee on Out-door Relief say of Kings County, New York, as follows:

Until 1879 public out-door relief was given by the county to the amount of $100,000, or more yearly; it was then cutoff in the middle of winter, without warning, without any substitute being provided, and the result was—nothing. In fact, except for the saving of money, and the stopping of political corruption