CHARITY TRUE AND FALSE.
ON Wednesday week a meeting in support of the Charity Organization Society was held at the Goldsmiths' Hall. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to exaggerate the strength of the case for rendering support to that most useful, most well managed and, if properly under- stood, most inspiring of public bodies. It is an organization which, in truth, needs no apology for its work, but only gratitude for its splendid achievement. The C.O.S. has but one fault, and that is one which calls for sympathy rather than reprobation, even when we hold that it is a fault that should be mended. The C.O.S. does not blow its own trumpet, does not advertise itself—a reticence too virtuous to be permissible in a wicked world. Worse, it does not take sufficient trouble to make people in general understand what is its true position. It does not answer its enemies. To this day there are thousands of people who think that the main object of the C.O.S. is to prevent people from wasting their money and their time in helping their fellow-creatures. There is a legend, of course apocryphal, that about 1820 a Church of England Catechism was published in which the question, " What are the main aims and objects of the Church ? " was answered as follows : " To protect the property of the rich,- and to repress the vices of the poor." There are plenty of people who believe, or pretend to believe, that this represents the considered view of the C.O.S. No doubt persons so maliciously foolish as this are in a minority, but there are a number of others who hold views almost as erroneous. They sincerely believe that the C.O.S. is some sort of cold, hard, statistical body whose object it is to prevent anybody being carried away by the passion of human feeling and sympathy. They repre- sent the C.O.S. as a sort of spectacled and slightly shrivelled archangel who stands by public men and says, " Beware ! Don't be precipitate. Keep your money tight in your pockets till you are quite sure that any effort is needed on your part to relieve distress.'-' As a matter of fact, this view is either a barefaced falsehood or an idiotic- parody of the Society's attitude. What the C.O.S. does is not to freeze or petrify the human heart, but to open it in wisdom and in faith. If we had to compress the spirit of the C.O.S. into one sentence, we should say that it was inspired by a passionate desire to prevent that most terrible of disasters, nay, crimes, the manufacture of paupers—the manufacture, that is, of economic and often, alas ! of moral imbeciles out of the raw material of men and women. .A. pauper, if any person will really take the trouble to look at him closely, is a human wreck, and yet this wreckage we are perpetually producing by a careless, unwise, and ill-judged dissipation of so-called charity. What is even worse, we carry on the dreadful pauperization by means of legislation ; some- times inspired by sentimentality ; sometimes by panic ; and sometimes even at the bidding of insidious con- spirators, whose aim it is to produce that revolution they desire through the ruin of the finance and the economic credit of the State. A nation of pauperized men and women is, they rightly feel, a good foundation for the Slave State which is the ideal of the Communist and the Bolshevik. Against this shameful unmaking of men and making of paupers the C.O.S. carries on a ceaseless war. And what nobler, more inspiring crusade could there be ? The devoted men and women who give their lives to the work of the C.O.S. without stint and without hope of reward, are as surely saving the nation as did the bravo men who fought for us in the trenches or the women who worked for us in the wards.
Incidentally, the C.O.S. unmasks the fraudulent villains who trade upon the sentiment and generosity of mankind. Larger work, however, and the work no one else undertakes, is preventing either the individual or the State from pauperizing. It keeps before us that admirable warning, " There would be no need of laws to provide fot distress if there were no laws to produce it." Yet this, though a great work, is the negative side of the C.O.S. The positive side is quite as great and, for many people, even more inspiring. It involves the direct relief of persons who are destitute, ill and suffering by a patient sympathy and by an exhaustive and scientific study of all the circum- stances of each case, and then by an equally patient and sympathetic organization or calling into existence of what may be termed the natural and proper creative and vitalized forces of relief. When the C.O.S. takes up a case—and it never ceases taking them up—it finds out first whether the case is a genuine one or a fraud, whether the man is really destitute or only proclaiming, himself destitute like the tramp who said to the old lady after she had given him two half-crowns, " I want to avoid, madam, what I dread more than anything else in the world, and that is, having to do a day's work."
Having once ascertained that the ease is one for relief, the Society never hesitates to apply its rule that the assistance which it believes to be due must always be adequate. Mere temporary subsidies or other palliatives never receive its sanction. It is in this work of finding out who ought to be helped and who ought to help, and organizing the help into adequate relief, that the C.O.S. excels. The present writer has again and again seen examples of men or families given a new start where help has been produced apparently out of nowhere, or, at any rate, from places which at first sight seemed hopeless. This miracle has been accomplished by the patience and good sense of the officers of the C.O.S. A man and his family are destitute, helpless and sick, and he is himself out of work, and very possibly too ill at the time to get any work. The C.O.S. finds out, in the first place, that he has got some relations, though they are at first pronounced too poor to help him. When, however, it is represented to them that, though they could not find £1 a week, or anything like it, there are at least three relatives who would find a couple of shillings each— the scene undergoes a change. This would be no remedy if nothing else could be found, but if there are other sources of help, then the six shillings would be a very welcome addition.
Next, inquiry is made about former employment. It is often found that the firm in which the man was employed for a long time in past years regarded him as a good worker, and are willing to give a small grant, say two shillings a week for three years. Then it is possible that something may be done by paying up arrears in a club or fund, and so a half-lapsed benefit may be secured. It may also be found that there is a local fund or a special charity, of which the man did not know himself, out of which a grant can properly be made. By these means it often happens that in a really deserving case some ten or twelve shillings a week can be put together. Further, some light work may be found for the man or sonic member of the family, or he may be relieved by the apprenticing of his children, or by sending the boys to a training ship or some industrial institution. Finally, having seen its way to getting ten or twelve shillings a week in this way for a period judged sufficient to restore the man to health or efficiency, the C.O.S. will often make a special appeal to its members or supporters. The result of such organization by the use of sympathetic imagination will often save a man from becoming a pauper, though he has got to the very brink of the precipice or is, indeed, half over. What is more, it usually has a good effect on the man and his family by giving them heart and hope, and preventing them from throwing up their hands and letting themselves sink, without effort, into the ocean of pauperism. Instead of forbidding the work of true charity, which is necessarily a work of love, the C.O.S. is insistent upon the duty of relatives, friends or employers to help a good case.
We must deal with another very common accusation against the Society—namely, that it asks questions that it has no right to ask. One is told with tragic earnestness by gentlemen of the impostor tribe that they would rather die than submit to the indignity of answering the questions asked them by the C.O.S. officials. As a matter of fact, the C.O.S. asks no questions which any honest man or woman could justly regard as insulting or which it would not become them to answer. The only people to whom the questions would be " an outrage " are people who would be exposed to shame if they gave true answers or would exhibit themselves as perjurers if they gave false ones. Persons who refuse to have their cases investigated by the C.O.S. should never receive assistance.
People will ask where the C.O.S. found its principles and who inspired them. It got them, though probably quite unconsciously, from one of the greatest of English- speaking men : that Scots divine with the mind and instinct of a philosopher, of an economist, and of a states- man, who yet was inspired with the deepest religious feeling, who was a Christian saint even more than he was a Hebrew prophet. We mean Thomas Chalmers. It was of him, remember, that Carlyle prayed that " a voice so humane, so true and wise, may long be heard in this debate and attentively laid to heart on all sides."
Chalmers was the protagonist of Charity Organization principles. He thundered them forth with a grandeur of language, a fearless inspiration, a magnificence of pathos worthy of Isaiah. His heart burnt within him as he thought of our dreadful commerce in human beings. He described how we traded and trafficked in affairs of moral death, how we took men and women, each capable of inspiring love and of loving others, and turned them into slavish paupers—first corrupting them by our wicked laws and then suffering them to corrupt us in return. Chalmers resented and denounced all proposals to let the State set up a huge legislative machinery for grinding the faces of the poor till they lost individuality, energy and all the moral qualities. He not only preached but he practised. In his own parish in Glasgow—he was a parish minister—he showed how love, care and sympathy could solve the problems of poverty and distress.
Like the C.O.S. he insisted, in season and out of season, that pauperism under normal conditions is a moral and not an economic evil, and requires a moral and not an economic remedy. With the passion almost of a poet he declared that every case could be relieved, and ought to be relieved, from one of the four fountains, as he called them—fountains frozen or dried up by the hand of legisla- tion. The first of these fountains. and by far the most productive, he declared, was situated in the habits and the economies of the people themselves. The best thing was for a man to make provision himself against the ills of life. But how difficult it is for a man to make such pro- vision when he is always being told that the world will not let him starve, and that therefore he is a fool to save! The second fountain, stopped, Chalmers declared, by State aid, was the kindness of relatives. Family affection was one of the oldest and most powerful forces in the history of the human race, but we were rapidly destroying it. The third fountain was the natural sympathy of the rich for the poor, which was largely destroyed by State aid. The last and the greatest of the four fountains of relief was the sympathy of the poor for one another.
These are the four fountains which the C.O.S. does its best to keep running and to use, and nobly does it perform its office.
We must end by affirming once more that it is essential to keep the C.O.S. in being, and not only to make it better known, but to let men see the noble spirit in which it works—a spirit capable of inspiring as great an enthusiasm as any cause in existence.
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