There are, besides these, 159 institutions for "penitents," which receive an income of a million per year; 156 institutions for social and physical improvement, which include a multitude of the most varied sorts, as, for example, educational, temperance, and Christian associations, social settlements, boys' brigades, societies for the improvement of dwellings, for the improvement of national health, for suppression of the white slave traffic, etc. These 156 institutions are maintained at an expense of something over three million and a half dollars per year.
Finally, there are 47 so-called "spiritual" institutions which are engaged in propagating in various ways and in various forms a knowledge of the Bible and a belief in the Christian religion. Although the spiritual associations represent less than one seventeenth of the total number of charitable organizations, nearly one fourth of the total amount of the charities is expended in maintaining them.
According to the best estimate that can be made, the amount of money thus expended is not less than fifty millions annually. This does not include, either, the sums collected and expended by the different churches—the Congregational, Catholic, and Established churches. In two dioceses of the Church of England—namely, those of London and Southwark—the sums raised in this way amounted to more than six hundred thousand dollars.
My attention was especially attracted by the number of shelters and refuges where homeless men, women, and children are given temporary aid of one kind and another. In addition to eight shelters maintained by the Salvation Army in different parts of the city, where homeless men and women are able to obtain a bed and something to eat, there is the asylum for the houseless poor, which claims to have given nights' lodging during the winter months to 80,000; the Free Shelter, in Ratcliffe Street East, which has given nights' lodging to 125,000; the Ham Yard Soup Kitchen and Hospice, which in 1908-1909 cared for 343 for an average of sixteen nights; the Providence Right Refuge and Home, with reports of nearly 2,100 lodgings, suppers, and breakfasts every week.
In addition to these there is a considerable number of refuges and shelters for various classes of persons—for sailors, soldiers, Jews, Asiatics, and Africans; for ballet girls; "ladies who, on account of their conversion to the Catholic faith, are obliged to leave their homes or situations"; for "respectable female servants"; homeless boys and girls, governesses; "Protestant servants while they are seeking employment in the families of the nobility," and for "young women employed in hotels and West End clubs."
These are but a few of the many different homes, lodging houses, and shelters with which the city is provided. In most cases it is stated in connection with these institutions that vagrants are rigidly excluded, and the purpose of most of them seems to be to keep respectable but unfortunate people from going to the public workhouses.
In addition to the fifty millions and more spent in charity, nearly twenty millions more is expended by the different boroughs of London for relief to the poor in institutions and in homes. Altogether, it costs something like seventy million dollars annually to provide for the poor and unfortunate of the city.
In the Southern States, where nine of the ten million Negroes in the United States make their homes, practically nothing is spent in charity upon the Negro. In two or three states reformatories have been established, so that Negro children arrested for petty crimes may not be sent to the chain gangs and confined with older and more hardened criminals employed in the mines and elsewhere. At the last session of the state legislature of Alabama a bill was passed providing that the state should take over and support a reformatory for coloured children which had been established and supported by the Negro women of the state. In several of the larger Southern cities Young Men's Christian Associations have been started which are supported by charity, and in certain instances hospitals have been established.
The only purpose for which the Negro has asked or received philanthropic aid has been for the support of education. The people of the United States have been generous in their contributions to Negro education. In spite of this fact the income of all the Negro colleges, industrial schools, and other institutions of so-called higher education in the South is not one fiftieth part of what is expended every year in London in charity and relief, not for the purpose of education, but merely to rescue from worse disaster the stranded, the outcasts, and those who are already lost.[6]