Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/171

Rh an original method of charitable work. The agents of this society, or the members themselves, go out into the slums of the city on Sunday mornings and gather in a number of tramps. The homeless wanderers are assembled in a room hired for the purpose and supplied with a warm breakfast, after which they are compelled to listen to a sermon and a lecture. They are then allowed to depart and live as best they can until the following Sunday. For a number of years this society has received a small appropriation from the city on the ground that it is a useful public charity. To all of these small societies, no matter what may be their alleged field of charitable work, city money is appropriated without specific knowledge of the exact purpose to which it is applied. By legislation or petition, backed by the influence of prominent citizens, scores of these petty organizations, some of them merely a fad or whim of an idle man or woman, have been placed on the list of semipublic charities to be aided at the expense of the taxpayers, and there they remain year after year without so much as a serious inquiry as to their merits or the work they accomplish. The city authorities who grant the appropriations do not and can not know how the money they give to such societies is to be expended, because they have no legal authority to investigate the conduct of such institutions. The city officers, therefore, are not to blame. The fault seems to rest primarily upon that condition of public opinion that is cheerfully tolerant of any fraud committed in the name of charity, and secondly upon the members of the Legislature who vote without question or investigation for all legislation asked for by any benevolent person or society.

To the large charitable and correctional institutions of established reputation, to which children or pauper adults are committed by the local authorities, city money is appropriated on a business basis. A fixed sum is paid for the support of each committed person, and the taxpayers may know what they are getting for their money. While the city authorities can not regulate the expenses or salaries in these institutions, they know that the city is paying for a specific service and that the work is performed. That it might be done better or more cheaply need not concern them. But to the institutions and societies that do not undertake to support dependent persons, but engage in indiscriminate charitable work, the giving of city money is as doubtful a method of relieving the deserving poor as throwing coin in the streets.

The appropriation of city money made for 1899 direct to two hundred and fifteen charitable and correctional institutions and socities amounts to $1,784,846. The appropriations from the excise funds to institutions that support pauper children and adults will