The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

It is perfectly natural that this should be so. In every nation, in all periods of history, it has been true. Sometimes this impulse toward charity and reform, which grows out of real personal study of the problems of poverty, goes very far toward saving a nation from ruin. No student of political economy can afford to ignore this impulse toward charity, and sweep it away as most thoughtless writers to-day are inclined to sweep it away, as though it were merely a conscious effort on the part of the rich to buy their way into the kingdom of heaven, to escape the accusing finger of the poor, and to avoid the payment of a debt to humanity long overdue. One must recall that, in the twenty years from 1742 to 1762, an impulse toward charity, based really on conditions very similar in their nature to our own, went far toward saving the nation of England from almost certain ruin. The rich at that time had forsaken religion, had plunged into immorality far deeper and far more general than the wealthy classes in the United States to-day, and come to sneer at purity and fidelity to the marriage vow, and openly boasted of their profligacy. The poor, on the other hand, had sunk to depths of ignorance and brutality absolutely unknown in this land of ours. The tremendous growth of manufacturing towns was the cause that widened the rift between these two classes. It was, in fact, exactly our phenomenon, differing only in degree. Society had come to live in deadly fear of the masses, so that the statute books of the land were filled with laws dealing death upon the poor for the most trivial of offences. It was a capital crime to cut down a cherry-tree; it was a capital crime to steal.

Mark well the sequel: Society was forced in its own defence to begin the study of the problem of wealth and poverty. Men and women who, through all their earlier years, had been carefully and sedulously trained to regard the poor as a different species, and to look with scorn and indifference upon their suffering, went into the streets of the industrial cities to learn. Ministers of God who had seen their churches empty year by year went out into the lanes and alleys of England to seek their flock. Hence sprung Whitfield and John Wesley, and hence the Methodist Church, which, whatever any one may think of its doctrine, could have justified its existence in the world by the work it did in the first twenty years of its lifetime.

A very little later, as a result of this same impulse of charity, growing out of a fight for life on the part of the higher classes, Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, founded in England his system of Sunday schools, the very beginning of popular education. Hannah More, a noble woman of the time, devoted the better part of her life to laying bare the horrible conditions of agricultural labour. Out of the same movement came Clarkson and Wilberforce with their tremendous anti-slavery campaign that was in the end to lead England to a peaceful if expensive emancipation. Before that era John Howard was a quiet country gentleman, wealthy and happy, and blindly ignorant of poverty and crime. At the end of it he took his place at the top of the list of the world’s great reformers; and the prisons of England, from that day to this, have never sunk to the depths of ignominy and shame in which they lay when John Howard first was moved to study them. Hospitals sprang up all over the land. Organized charity began in England. The poor of England, from that day to this, have at least been considered human beings, instead of mere beasts that perish.

Therefore, let me repeat, it is fatuous to dismiss the present tendency toward charity and reform as if it were mere time-serving. It may be, indeed, that it is one of the greatest economic facts in America to-day. It may be that, as it spreads and grows and brings into the battle thousands upon thousands of devoted men and women, hundreds of millions of dollars of hoarded wealth, social reform upon social reform, it will act as a check and an offset to the tremendous industrial discontent that is spreading over the country. It may be that, as in England, it will bridge the chasm between the rich and the poor, or, at the worst, prevent its widening to the point of open war.

I hesitate to undertake any extensive review of the great charities and reforms that have sprung out of this new impulse that has moved the rich to study the poor. I hesitate not because there is dearth of material, but because of my own knowledge. I know that the facts of record are but a very small part of all the facts in the case. The tremendous benefactions of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Mrs. Sage, do not begin to measure the organized and unorganized charities that have been inaugurated by the wealthy within the past ten years.

Personally, I do not think very much about the forms of charity that are to-day most prevalent amongst the wealthy. Millions of dollars every year are poured indiscriminately into all sorts of hoppers here in New York, in the vain hope that they will help to bring about better conditions. Money-charity, if I may call it so, seems to me a beautiful thing if it is really done in a spirit of helpfulness—but, alas, how vain it is! I do not know but that, in the case of more than half the recipients of charity of this indiscriminate sort, it does more harm than good. This I do know, that, according to the best estimates obtainable, from eighteen per cent. to twenty-five per cent. of the people of New York State accept charity every year. This is a matter of record. How many more are the recipients of unrecorded charity I do not know, but I should not be surprised if forty per cent. of the population of the greatest state of the Union are the beneficiaries of charity, of one sort and another, in such a year as 1908, for instance.

Professor Bushnell, in an estimate made some years ago, estimated that nearly two hundred million dollars a year was spent upon the maintenance of abnormal dependents in the United States. Think, then, of the amount of money that must be lavished upon the thousand and one indiscriminate charities extended to people who cannot be classed as dependents at all.

Charity, beautiful as it is in many instances, is a hopeless answer to the questions of the day. The wonderful growth of it in the past three or four years in the social world to which I belong is hopeful, not because of the actual good it has accomplished or can accomplish, but simply because it is another index of the times, another indubitable sign that the wealthy men and women of Society are really throwing their hearts and minds into the mighty problem of adjusting the relationship between the classes which are so rapidly drifting apart.

Of all the charities I know, I think that the sanest, the most far-sighted, and the most surely pregnant with good is the Sage Foundation. Perhaps my opinion is little more than conceit. I myself have given so much time and effort to studying the causes of the growth of poverty in this country that perhaps an institution founded with a tremendous fund of money behind it to carry on an exhaustive and scientific research into the causes of poverty strikes me as the most intelligent of all the charities I have ever seen, merely because it fits in with my own personal ideas, and is the very charity I myself would have founded had I had the disposition toward charity and the means to put it into effect.

I cannot speak with authority of the actual work that the Sage Foundation is doing; but I fancy, if one could to-day take an inventory of actual results accomplished, he would find that the foundation has barely been begun, and that these artisans of the millennium have not yet even drawn tentative plans for the superstructure. I have, however, read with extreme interest a report made by the trustees as the result of an investigation of the living conditions in families in New York City, and I do not hesitate to say that, in the compilation of that report alone, the Sage Foundation has accomplished a work of great practical utility.