Why should there by any necessity for almsgiving in a civilized
community? It is not the charitable mind to which I object. Heaven
forbid that we should ever grow cold toward a fellow creature in need. Human sympathy is too fine for the cool, calculating attitude to take its place. One can name very few great advances that did not have human sympathy behind them. It is in order to help people that every notable service is undertaken.
The trouble is that we have been using this great, fine motive force for
ends too small. If human sympathy prompts us to feed the hungry, why
should it not give the larger desire--to make hunger in our midst
impossible? If we have sympathy enough for people to help them out of
their troubles, surely we ought to have sympathy enough to keep them
out.
It is easy to give; it is harder to make giving unnecessary. To make the
giving unnecessary we must look beyond the individual to the cause of
his misery--not hesitating, of course, to relieve him in the meantime, but not stopping with mere temporary relief. The difficulty seems to be in getting to look beyond to the causes. More people can be moved to help a poor family than can be moved to give their minds toward the removal of poverty altogether.
I have no patience with professional charity, or with any sort of
commercialized humanitarianism. The moment human helpfulness is
systematized, organized, commercialized, and professionalized, the heart
of it is extinguished, and it becomes a cold and clammy thing.
Real human helpfulness is never card-catalogued or advertised. There are
more orphan children being cared for in the private homes of people who
love them than in the institutions. There are more old people being
sheltered by friends than you can find in the old people's homes. There
is more aid by loans from family to family than by the loan societies. That is, human society on a humane basis looks out for itself. It is a grave question how far we ought to countenance the commercialization of the natural instinct of charity.
Professional charity is not only cold but it hurts more than it helps. It degrades the recipients and drugs their self-respect. Akin to it is sentimental idealism. The idea went abroad not so many years ago that "service" was something that we should expect to have done for us. Untold numbers of people became the recipients of well-meant "social service." Whole sections of our population were coddled into a state of expectant, child-like helplessness. There grew up a regular profession of doing things for people, which gave an outlet for a laudable desire for service, but which contributed nothing whatever to the self-reliance of the people nor to the correction of the conditions out of which the supposed need for such service grew.
Worse than this encouragement of childish wistfulness, instead of
training for self-reliance and self-sufficiency, was the creation of a
feeling of resentment which nearly always overtakes the objects of
charity. People often complain of the "ingratitude" of those whom they
help. Nothing is more natural. In the first place, precious little of
our so-called charity is ever real charity, offered out of a heart full
of interest and sympathy. In the second place, no person ever relishes
being in a position where he is forced to take favors.
Such "social work" creates a strained relation--the recipient of bounty
feels that he has been belittled in the taking, and it is a question
whether the giver should not also feel that he has been belittled in the
giving. Charity never led to a settled state of affairs. The charitable
system that does not aim to make itself unnecessary is not performing
service. It is simply making a job for itself and is an added item to
the record of non-production.