The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them

by Charles Loring Brace

Charities, to be permanent and efficient, must be organized with as much exactness and order as business associations, and carry with them something of the same energy and motives of action. But the tendency, as is well known from European experience, of all old charities, is to sluggishness, want of enterprise, and careless business arrangement, as well as to mechanical routine in the treatment of their subjects. The reason of this is to be found in the somewhat exceptional abnormal position—economically considered—of the worker in fields of benevolence. All laborers in the intellectual and moral field are exposed to the dangers of routine. But in education, for instance, and the offices of the Church, there is a constant and healthy competition going on, and certain prizes are held out to the successful worker, which tend continually to arouse his faculties, and lead him to invent new methods of attaining his ends. The relative want of this among the Catholic clergy may be the cause of their lack of intellectual activity, as compared with the Protestant.

In the management of charities there is a prevailing impression that what may be called "interested motives" should be entirely excluded. The worker, having entered the work under the enthusiasm of humanity, should continue buoyed up by that enthusiasm. His salary may be seldom changed. It will be ordinarily beneath that which is earned by corresponding ability outside. No rewards of rank or fame are held out to him. He is expected to find his pay in his labor.

Now there are certain individuals so filled with compassion for human sufferings, or so inspired by Religion, or who so much value the offering of respect returned by mankind for their sacrifices, that they do not need the impulse of ordinary motives to make their work as energetic and inventive and faithful as any labor under the motives of competition and gain.

But the great majority of the instruments and agents of a charity are not of this kind. They must have something of the common inducements of mankind held out before them. If these be withdrawn, they become gradually sluggish, uninventive, inexact, and lacking in the necessary enterprise and ardor.

The agents of the old endowed charities of England are said often to become as lazy and mechanical as monks in monasteries.

To remedy such evils, the trustees of all charities should hold out a regular scale of salaries, which different agents could attain to if they were successful. The principle, too, which should govern the amounts paid to each agent, should be well considered. Of course, the governing law for all salaries are the demand and supply for such services. But an agent for a charity, even as a missionary, sometimes puts himself voluntarily outside of such a law. He throws himself into a great moral and religious cause, and consumes his best powers in it, and unfits himself (it may be) for other employments. His own field may be too narrow to occasion much demand for his peculiar experience and talent from other sources. There comes then a certain moral obligation on the managers of the charity, not to take him at the cheapest rate for which they can secure his services, but to proportion his payment somewhat to what he would have been worth in other fields, and thus to hold out to him some of the inducements of ordinary life. The salary should be large enough to allow the agent and his family to live somewhat as those of corresponding ability and education do, and still to save something for old age or a time of need. Some benevolent associations have obtained this by a very wise arrangement—that of an "annuity insurance" of the life of their agents, which secured them a certain income at a given age.

With the consciousness thus of an appreciation of their labors, and a payment somewhat in proportion to their value, and a permanent connection with their humane enterprise, the ordinary employes and officials come to have somewhat of the interest in it which men take in selfish pursuits, and will exercise the inventiveness, economy, and energy that are shown in business enterprises.

Every one knows how almost impossible it is for a charity to conduct, for instance, a branch of manufacture with profit. The explanation is that the lower motives are not applied to it. Selfishness is more alert and economical than benevolence.

On the other side, however, it will not be best to let a charity become too much of a business. There must always be a certain generosity and compassion, a degree of freedom in management, which are not allowed in business undertakings. The agents must have heart as well as head. The moisture of compassion must not be dried up by too much discipline.

Organization must not swallow up the soul. Routine may be carried so far as to make the aiding of misery the mere dry working of a machine.