CHAPTER V: The Cruelty of Charity

"Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the
good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing
up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater
curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing
population of imbeciles."

Herbert Spencer

The last century has witnessed the rise and development of philanthropy
and organized charity. Coincident with the all-conquering power of
machinery and capitalistic control, with the unprecedented growth
of great cities and industrial centers, and the creation of great
proletarian populations, modern civilization has been confronted, to a
degree hitherto unknown in human history, with the complex problem of
sustaining human life in surroundings and under conditions flagrantly
dysgenic.

The program, as I believe all competent authorities in contemporary
philanthropy and organized charity would agree, has been altered in aim
and purpose. It was first the outgrowth of humanitarian and altruistic
idealism, perhaps not devoid of a strain of sentimentalism, of an
idealism that was aroused by a desperate picture of human misery
intensified by the industrial revolution. It has developed in later
years into a program not so much aiming to succor the unfortunate
victims of circumstances, as to effect what we may term social
sanitation. Primarily, it is a program of self-protection. Contemporary
philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that extreme poverty and overcrowded
slums are veritable breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency