"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
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.
It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its
very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves
the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the
symptom of a malignant social disease.
Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to
diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils
that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest
sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating
constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and
dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of
philanthropy, but rather at its success.
These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism,
dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of
inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century
at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of
Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating
and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which
expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. One
of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or
seventy years ago wrote: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most
arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the
moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I
instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within reach
of a bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a state of things
in which no man will ever stand in need of any other man's help, but
will derive all his satisfaction from the great social tides which
own no individual names. I am sure no man can be put in a position of
dependence upon another, without the other's very soon becoming--if he
accepts the duties of the relation--utterly degraded out of his just
human proportions. No man can play the Deity to his fellow man with
impunity--I mean, spiritual impunity, of course. For see: if I am at all
satisfied with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of
generosity towards others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to
the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead
of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the
interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake of the profit it
yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope the reign of benevolence
is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of God will be
impossible."
To-day, we may measure the evil effects of "benevolence" of this type,
not merely upon those who have indulged in it, but upon the community at
large. These effects have been reduced to statistics and we cannot, if
we would, escape their significance. Look, for instance (since they are
close at hand, and fairly representative of conditions elsewhere) at
the total annual expenditures of public and private "charities and
corrections" for the State of New York. For the year ending June 30,
1919, the expenditures of public institutions and agencies amounted to
$33, 936,205.88. The expenditures of privately supported and endowed
institutions for the same year, amount to $58,100,530.98. This makes
a total, for public and private charities and corrections of
$92,036,736.86. A conservative estimate of the increase for the
year (1920-1921) brings this figure approximately to one-hundred and
twenty-five millions. These figures take on an eloquent significance if
we compare them to the comparatively small amounts spent upon education,
conservation of health and other constructive efforts. Thus, while the
City of New York spent $7.35 per capita on public education in the year
1918, it spent on public charities no less than $2.66. Add to this last
figure an even larger amount dispensed by private agencies, and we may
derive some definite sense of the heavy burden of dependency, pauperism
and delinquency upon the normal and healthy sections of the community.
Statistics now available also inform us that more than a million dollars
are spent annually to support the public and private institutions in
the state of New York for the segregation of the feeble-minded and
the epileptic. A million and a half is spent for the up-keep of state
prisons, those homes of the "defective delinquent." Insanity, which, we
should remember, is to a great extent hereditary, annually drains from
the state treasury no less than $11,985,695.55, and from private sources
and endowments another twenty millions. When we learn further that the
total number of inmates in public and private institutions in the State
of New York--in alms-houses, reformatories, schools for the blind,
deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in homes for the feeble-minded and
epileptic--amounts practically to less than sixty-five thousand, an
insignificant number compared to the total population, our eyes should
be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of
human waste.
The United States Public Health Survey of the State of Oregon, recently
published, shows that even a young community, rich in natural resources,
and unusually progressive in legislative measures, is no less subject to
this burden. Out of a total population of 783,000 it is estimated that
more than 75,000 men, women and children are dependents, feeble-minded,
or delinquents. Thus about 10 per cent. of the population is a constant
drain on the finances, health, and future of that community. These
figures represent a more definite and precise survey than the rough one
indicated by the statistics of charities and correction for the State
of New York. The figures yielded by this Oregon survey are also
considerably lower than the average shown by the draft examination, a
fact which indicates that they are not higher than might be obtained
from other States.
Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of
feeble-mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far
neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form
of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and
charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until
it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such
"benevolence" is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to
the community and the future of the race.
But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely
advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of
private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious
than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of
maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities
to slum mothers. Such women are to be visited by nurses and to receive
instruction in the "hygiene of pregnancy"; to be guided in making
arrangements for confinements; to be invited to come to the doctor's
clinics for examination and supervision. They are, we are informed, to
"receive adequate care during pregnancy, at confinement, and for one
month afterward." Thus are mothers and babies to be saved. "Childbearing
is to be made safe." The work of the maternity centers in the various
American cities in which they have already been established and in which
they are supported by private contributions and endowment, it is hardly
necessary to point out, is carried on among the poor and more docile
sections of the city, among mothers least able, through poverty and
ignorance, to afford the care and attention necessary for successful
maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the
British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality
reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always
associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect,
feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of
maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private
philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most
dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the
function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute
necessity is to discourage it.
Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It
conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face
unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women
to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the
human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question
its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never
the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and
often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the
choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring
children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are
prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers
realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing
the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity
center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how
to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid
bringing into the world her eighth.
Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind
only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most
deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the
world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity
of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree,
a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to
eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race
and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.
On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened
public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy,
maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our
boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions
of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and
barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many
high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful
facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so
necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their
"hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate
action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first
superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be
worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of
the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those
too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done
at once."
They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to
subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking.
As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often
forgotten passage:
"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole
it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or
harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does
great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering,
it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious,
that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the
world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do
much by rapid action, and that they will most benefit the world when
they most relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen,
`something' ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to
hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one
can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain
that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might
almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others
had not inherited from their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for
instant action."
It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon
the basis of the sanctity of human life. Yet recent events in the world
reveal a curious contradiction in this respect. Human life is held
sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when
humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism,
inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to
facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are enforced to weaken and
starve civilian populations--women and children. This accomplished, the
pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and
the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion.
Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed. We begin to hold human life
sacred again. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly
sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. We indulge in
"drives," in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international
charity.
We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of
international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities,
where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are
forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so
in the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less
populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which
are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of militaristic
statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless propagation and
its consequent over-population.
The people of the United States have recently been called upon to
exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European
Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred
thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to
contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese
who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those
recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert
country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of
duty. The results of this international charity have not justified the
effort nor repaid the generosity to which it appealed. In the first
place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of the disaster; in
the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts to sweep back the
tide of miseries created by unrestricted propagation, with the feeble
broom of sentiment. As one of the most observant and impartial of
authorities on the Far East, J. O. P. Bland, has pointed out: "So long
as China maintains a birth-rate that is estimated at fifty-five per
thousand or more, the only possible alternative to these visitations
would be emigration and this would have to be on such a scale as would
speedily overrun and overfill the habitable globe. Neither humanitarian
schemes, international charities nor philanthropies can prevent
widespread disaster to a people which habitually breeds up to and
beyond the maximum limits of its food supply." Upon this point, it is
interesting to add, Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip has likewise pointed out the
inefficacy and misdirection of this type of international charity.(1)
Mr. Bland further points out: "The problem presented is one with which
neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long as we
fail to recognize and attack the fundamental cause of these calamities.
As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of our missionary
societies to reduce the deathrate by the prevention of infanticide and
the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to aggravate the
pressure of population upon its food-supply and to increase the
severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe. What is needed for
the prevention, or, at least, the mitigation of these scourges, is an
organized educational propaganda, directed first against polygamy
and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and, next, toward such a
limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate the standard
of civilized countries. But so long as Bishops and well meaning
philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage
`the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of
minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in
China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own
pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined
weaklings."
This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold
inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity.
The most serious charge that can be brought against modern "benevolence"
is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents
and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world
community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.
Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing
upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked
at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect
probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial
practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too
rich and others too poor.
(1) Birth Control Review. Vol. V. No. 4. p. 7.