The St. Mary banner. (Franklin, Parish of St. Mary, La.) 1889-1931, 1903-04-18
NEW IDEAS OF CHARITY.
MODERN SCIENCE RECOGNIZES
HUMAN LIFE'S SACREDNESS.
Rational Efforts to Reclaim What is
Worthy in Humanity-OId Interpre-
taticns of Pauperism Passing--New
philanthropy Fighting tuberculosis.

taticns Of Pauperism Passing--New
Philanthropy Fighting tuberculosis.
Old ideas of charity were bushel OF
| potatoes and sack Of -four This was
undisguised in its brutality, fantastic
in it's ugliness. Around the hateful
and degraded name Of 'pauper' had
accumulated centuries Of funereal
hopelessness, mockery and despair
Feeding the poor was simply a busi-
ness OF keeping an excrescent part OF
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 a
month in winter; the Office of the
county physician open for an hour a
day for 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 weary sing-song from the
frozen roadway:
Rattle their bones over the stones,
They're only paupers whom nobody
owns.
Pauper, poorhouse, Potters 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
fractions children with them; preachers
more eloquent than dutiful have con-
structed beautiful perorations on them.
And in time there has attached to them
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
new charity-the charity that "edii-
eth" the charity of hope and comfort
and restitution. 1t has not quite come,
but it is coming; and it 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.
it is not enough to keep the
decrepit and the decayed from dying
in melo-dramattc squalor; the goth Gen.
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 a man, indeed, If
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.
These hopeless ones are but the ravel-
ngs of discarded fabric, an evolu-
Lionary necessity.
In reading history one can hardly
'ail to have been struck with tn, ap-
pal:ing waste of human life that has
marked progress. Eliminating all wars
hat have strewn the valley of the Eu-
)nrates, the banks of the Nile, the
shores of the Mediterranean, the for
,sts of Germany, with butchered dead,
l.ere has been such sQuandering of
as horrifies the modern con-
cience.
Disease, hunger, neglect, ignorance,
heer wantonness ana brutality, have
upon costly human life, more
nd more terribly as you search back
ward through the centuries, till the
marvel is that the race aid not, one
ime or another, end its existence in a
evel of insensate sacrifice.
The sacredness of life seems, in
eed, to be modern idea; and, despite
II the wailings of the pessimists, the
reat fact stands out like a signal in
he dawn, that the humanity Of hu-
1anity is a discovery of modern times.
he death of that mother and babe,
through some sad and sorry mishap, |
I hunger and cold here in New York
be other night, was an event more |
hooking to the public mind than the
,ss of hundreds would have been to
he ancient or even the medieval
ceiling.
So all the skill of modern science is
oncentrated upon the saving Of life,
little inspired, perhaps, by the fun
( the thing" as one enthusiastic med |.
al student has expressed it, but more
y the distinctly modern notion that
very life is in some way valuable.
nd so again, modern charity, such as
represented by the Charity Organi-
alton society, feels that its duty is
OF merely to relieve, but to revive
nd to restore.
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