and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent the individual family
from sinking to that abject condition in which it will become a much
heavier burden upon society.

There is no need here to criticize the obvious limitations of organized
charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution. We are all
familiar with these criticisms: the common indictment of "inefficiency"
so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies. The
charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization
of deserving poor, and the encouragement and fostering of the
"undeserving"; the progressive destruction of self-respect and
self-reliance by the paternalistic interference of social agencies; the
impossibility of keeping pace with the ever-increasing multiplication of
factors and influences responsible for the perpetuation of human misery;
the misdirection and misappropriation of endowments; the absence of
interorganization and coordination of the various agencies of church,
state, and privately endowed institutions; the "crimes of charity"
that are occasionally exposed in newspaper scandals. These and similar
strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as
inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being
eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in
modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of
modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers
and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing
and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the
evils of poverty and the menace to the race engendered by misery and
filth.

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that
it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism.