The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-11-30
BEGGING MAIL OF THE RICH
TNf MANY LETTERS RECEIYED BY
 AILLIONiIRES.

How They Arc Treated by Miss Helen Gould, the Roclefellers and Russell sagc-Helen Gould's Liberality.
 Rated in accordance with the num- Der of begging letters received, Miss Helen Gould would probably be ranked first among the men and women of New York who measure their wealth by millions, though this was not so, perhaps, till after she had begun her remarkable work of relieving the wants of the soldiers.
 Miss Gould treats her begging mall with much greater respect than do most persons of large wealth, for un- less usually engaged with other mat ters, she reads every letter asking for financial aid on the same day it is received, setting aside a certain part of each "A hours for it's perusal in com- pany with her private secretary. Many of these letters, most of them, in fact, are so palpably fakes, that no serious attention is paid to them, yet so sin cerely courteous and considerate of the feelings of others is Miss Gould that a polite answer is sent by the next post to nearly every writing aims asker.
 Miss Gould's begging mail must call for a preppsterous annual aggregate of charity nowadays, for it has almost doubled within the last six months, and the otal asks for in gifts by letter in the year 1897 as footed up her pri- vate secretary was little more than $1,0Oo,000,, or about $2.740 a day.
 How much she actually gives out for charity not even her private secretary knows, many benefactions being ex- tended by Miss Gould in absolute se- crecy.
 Though richer than she by a goodly number of millions, her brother George does not receive nearly so many beg ging letters, nor does he open his hand so freely as she, yet his begging mail is sometimes enormous, and the num- Der of favorable responses is greater than is generally supposed.
 How the younger of the two inn mensely rich Rockefeller brothers treats his begging mail has never leaked out, but John D. Rockefeller and his family are known to give it great deal of their personal attention.
 Thew 1nnl< aftpr if Q r ct tiyna when every memberr of the family present takes his share of the letters asking for favors, scans them and later reads them aloud to the others. A good proportion of all the Rockefeller letters are inconsequential, as a matter of course, and these receive little dis cussion. This is true also of the few which add threats to their pleadings, for the Rockefellers have long been ase-hardened to this sort of epstle, like most other modern millionaires. Letters full of unconscious humor and those in which the writers strive to make their point by being purposely humorous are more common than those of sinister import Fewest of all, as might be imagined, are the letters which seem really worthy.
 These always receive the most re- spectful consideration, often being dis cussed at length and sometimes al- most formally, it being comparatively common, after a good deal has been said pro and con as to the merits of the appeal, for some members of the family of move the request be grant ed' or investigated'' or dropped" In such cases the fate of the petitioner is often decided by vote, but it not infrequently happens that the asked for relief is granted, in spite of an ad- verse vote, by some member of the family who believes the case deserving in spite of the burden of opinon the other way.
 Notwithstanding his uncharitable reputation, Uncle Russell Sage gets a big begging mail, though it is smaller than that received by Mrs. Sage. She told a friend one day that MT. Sage re- ceives more requests for favors on the western railroads in which he is inter- ested than for any sort of benefaction, and that he is forever agreeing to haul freight free for some man who has suf- fered a loss of crops, or sending passes to some one who has made a mess of it in the west and wants to get east again, or helping to buy seed for a farmer who finds the world temporar- fly against him.
 Still the general impression that Mrs. Sage is more open-handed than her husband is undoubtedly correct, her benefactions, given entirely without ostentation as rule, aggregating many thousands of dollars a year. Russell Sage himself has only one serious ob- jecton to submitting to Q general newspaper interview, and it is that ev- cry article detailing such an interview is followed by an enormous increase in his begging naail.-New York Press THE POOR IN INDIAN TERRITORY
 "The sofka patch" is still the main reliance in the interior of the Indian nations. In the towns one encounters Indian lawyers, Indian bankers, Indian graduates of colleges, Indian business men, Indians who only differ from Americans in that they hold tribal cit izenship. But back of the towns, away from the railroads, are the cabins and the sofa patches. The log house has taken the place of the tepee and the sofka patch has made existence possi- 111o oI1o SOfl +nJ,