ABUSE OF PUBLIC CHARITY.
By BIRD S. COLER,
COMPTROLLER OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK.
Ten per cent of all the human beings who die in New York city are buried in Potter's Field at public expense; but the records of organized charity, official and semiofficial, show that less than one per cent of the living are paupers or dependent persons. There are two explanations of the difference between the number of living poor and penniless dead. The chief one is that abuse of public charity has grown to such proportions that the city has become the Mecca of the chronic idlers and tramps of the entire country. It is easier for an industrious and shrewd professional beggar to live in luxury in New York than to exist in any other city in the world. No magic wand of ancient fable was ever more potent to unlock the gates of castle or prison than the name of charity is to open a way to the public treasury. The liberal and well-nigh indiscriminate giving of the money of the taxpayers for the relief of sickness and poverty has been commanded by law, sanctioned by custom, and approved by public opinion until the possibility of checking or reforming the abuse grows more and more remote as the burden increases and the evil results multiply.
The city of New York gives annually to public charity more than $5,000,000, and contributes indirectly $2,000,000 more. Of the money raised by taxation for city purposes proper (State taxes, interest, and county expenses eliminated), almost twelve per cent is properly chargeable to relief of poverty and sickness. Of this expenditure more than $3,000,000 is paid to private institutions and societies over which the city authorities have no control or supervision. The payments are made in compliance with the provisions of acts of the State Legislature. The only provision in these laws that enables the city officers to protect the treasury from fraud is a clause under which the comptroller is permitted to verify the bills of the institutions for the care of committed persons. There is a constitutional safeguard against outright swindling of the city, in the requirement that charitable institutions shall be inspected and their bills approved by the State Board of Charities, but the system is open to many abuses where the public officers are powerless.
The present comptroller of the city has found that a number of alleged charitable institutions and societies receiving money from the city apply nearly all their funds to the payment of salaries of officers and employees, while their relief work is very limited and of doubtful character. Other societies, he found upon investigation, really encourage professional beggars without in any case relieving deserving poor. A few cases were so flagrant in their abuse of public charity that the further payment of city money to the societies was refused. In one case he found that a society which claimed a board of directors and numerous officers was really managed by one person, who in one year had received $1,500 from the city and $70 from all other sources, and had expended $1,300 of the amount for salaries and $40 for the relief of the destitute.
The Department of Public Charities, for the maintenance of which the sum of $1,941,215 is appropriated for the year 1899, is controlled entirely by the city. The balance of the $5,000,000 appropriated annually for the same general purpose is divided among more than two hundred societies and institutions managed by corporations or private individuals. In theory none of these private institutions is supported by the city, the municipality merely paying to them a fixed sum, which is supposed to be supplemented by private donations. In reality nine tenths of them could not exist six months without the money they receive from the public treasury. Very few of these semipublic charities have an income from all other sources equal to the appropriation from the city.
The city pays for the support of a child in a private institution the sum of $110 a year, and the average allowance for the maintenance of an adult is $150. The percentage of children among the dependent persons is almost three to one, so the $5,000,000 public charity fund would feed and clothe more than forty thousand persons each year if applied directly to that purpose. In the distribution of this great sum of public money, however, fully $2,000,000 of the amount is absorbed in the payment of salaries and expenses, and therein exists an abuse of public charity so great that the present comptroller of the city some months ago appealed to the Legislature for relief in the form of legislation which would enable the local authorities to stop payments to many societies. There are numerous small institutions, some of them having the indorsement and moral support of leading citizens, that spend from sixty to eighty per cent of all the money they receive in the payment of salaries, and in one case discovered by the comptroller the expenses absorbed ninety-four per cent of the total income of the society!