of parentage themselves, and it follows that the rank and file of those
in the service of Charity falls far below the standard necessary to
give these poor children that chance in the world the cheque-writing
philanthropist believes he is giving them. The great proportion of the
servants and administrators of Charities are doing that work because
they can get nothing better to do--and it is not considered remarkably
high-class work. These things have to be reckoned with by every
philanthropic person with sufficient faith to believe that an
enterprise may not only look well, but do well. One gets a Waugh or a
Barnardo now and then, a gleam of efficiency in the waste, and for the
rest this spectacle of stinted thought and unstinted giving, this
modern Charity, is often no more than a pretentious wholesale
substitute for retail misery and disaster. Fourteen million pounds a
year, I am told, go to British Charities, and I doubt if anything like
a fair million's worth of palliative amelioration is attained for this
expenditure. As for any permanent improvement, I doubt if all these
Charities together achieve a net advance that could not be got by the
discreet and able expenditure of ten or twelve thousand pounds.

It is one of the grimmest ironies in life, that athwart the memory of
sainted founders should be written the most tragic consequences. The
Foundling Hospital of London, established by Coram--to save infant
lives!--buried, between 1756 and 1760, 10,534 children out of 14,934
received, and the Dublin Foundling Hospital (suppressed in 1835) had a
mortality of eighty per cent. The two great Russian institutions are, I
gather, about equally deadly with seventy-five per cent., and the
Italian institutes run to about ninety per cent. The Florentine boasts
a very beautiful and touching series of _putti_ by Delia Robbia,
that does little or nothing to diminish its death-rate. So far from
preventing infant murder these places, with the noblest intentions in