The star. (Reynoldsville, Pa.) 1892-1946, 1903-02-11
NEW IDEAS OF CHARITY.
MODERN SCIENCE RECOGNIZES
HUMAN LlFE's sAcREDNEss.

Old ideas Of charity were bushel OF
potatoes and sack of -four This was
undisguised in its brutality, fantastic
In its ugliness. Around the hateful
and degraded name of 'pauper" had
accumulated centuries of funereal
hopelessness, mockery and despair.
Feeding the poor was simply busi-
the population from starving to death,
out of respect for the dominant sense
OF decency in the community.
Potatoes and -four, and meat dealt
out at stated intervals; coal twice
month in winter; the Office of the
county physician open for an hour a
day for a conclave Of dolors, dumps
and disease that left the doctor waver-
ing between anger, disgust and heart
sick Indifference; craft and whining
and obstinacy on the one side, and
iron-faced rigidity on the other, month
after month and year after year, until
death, more truly charitable than So
ciety, stepped in for mercy.
Then, for the ultimate indignity, the
undertaken who had the contract to
bury paupers for one-sixteenth of a
cent head, with the privilege to get
what he could from relatives Of "the
dear departed" and the solitary hearse
pounding a weary sing-song from the
frozen roadway:
Rattle their bones over the stones,
They're only paupers whom nobody
owns.
Pauper, poorhouse, Potter's Field. In
all the language there can hardly be
found three words that convey to the
lively intelligence more of horror and
odium and rank misery. Melancholy
minor poets have weaved pathetic lines
about them; mothers have frightened
tractious children with them; preachers
more eloquent than dutiful have con-
structed beautiful perorations on them.
And in time there has attached to them
a shame that has made of such official
charity rampant and disgraceful
farce.
Such was the old charity-such, per-
haps, the charity that still is practised
in communities that have Jagged be-
hind the procession. But there is a
new charity-the charity that "edifi-
eth," the charity of hope and comfort
and restitution. 1t has not quite come,
but 1t is coming; and 1t brings, not
-four and potatoes merely, but light and
life and the desire for them.
AS DR.. Felix Adler said the other
day, the essence of charity is to save
life. We may add, by way Of contrast,
that the old idea was to save trouble.
Nowadays 1t is not enough to keep the
decrepit and the decayed from dying
in melo-dramatic squalor; the Goth CEN
tury purpose goes deeper far than that,
and seeks not only to prolong life,
but to make that life of some contin-
ued service in the general scheme of
usefulness. What is man, indeed, II
his chief good and market of his time
be but to sleep and feed?"
Derelicts there must be yet, of
course, hauled up tight and dry on the
islands of East river; but for every
one of these, there are saved scores
of others who are worth the saving.
ings of discarded fabric, an evolu-
tionary necessity.
In reading history one can hardly
fail to have been struck with the ap-
palling waste of human life that has
marked progress. Eliminating all wars
that have strewn the valley of the Eu
pirates, the banks of the Nile, the
shores of the Mediterranean, the for
ests of Germany, with butchered dead
tLere has been such squandering OF
mankind as horrifies the modern con-
science.
Disease, hunger, neglect. ignorance
sheer wantonness ana brutality, have
warred upon costly human life, more
and more terribly as you search back.
ward through the centuries, till the
marvel is that the race aid not, one
time or another, end its existence in c
revel of insensate sacrifice.
The sacredness of life seems, in
deed, to be modern idea; and, despite
all the wailings OF the pessimists, the
great fact stands out like O signal IL
the dawn, that the humanity OF hui
manity is a discovery Of modern times
The death Of that mother and babe
through some sad and sorry mishap
| OF hunger and cold here in New Yorl
the other night, was an event more
shocking to the public mind than thu
loss of hundreds would have been tC
the ancient or even the mediaeva
| feeling.
So all the skill of modern science |!
concentrated upon the saving of life
a little inspired, perhaps, by the "fur
of the thing as one enthusiastic med
ical student has expressed it, but more
by the distinctly modern notion tina
every life is in some way valuable
| And so again, modern charity, such al
is represented by the Charity Organi
zation society, feels that its duty Il
not merely to relieve. but to reviv,
and to restore.
The agents of the Charity Organiza
tion society found, in their daily walk
and talks among the poor, that al