The Farmington times. (Farmington, St. Francois County, Mo.) 1905-1926, 1919-05-16
THE NEW ERA AND CHARITY


and multitude of sinners. For the
most part it is the camouflage pain
for rapacity, selfishness, false pride
and deceit.
Once the greatest virtues, Charity
has, by the Unitarian Age that makes
Dollars of Deities, been converted in
to a shield for wrongdoers and 6
means for the perpetuation of human
inequality.
In the "Vision of Sir Launfal,
Lowell has the Spirit say:
"Who gives himself with his aims
| feeds three,
Himself, his hungering neighbor and
| Me-"
That is the real Charity-the Char
ity that the ancients knew by the
word Love. That is the Charity of
Christ:
Though bestow all my goods to
feed the poor, and have not Charity,
it proiiteth me nothing"
Today Charity has developed into
mere OBSERVATION-DISCLOSURES, u.s.
ually with an Interior motive. How
aims? The purse-proud toss pennies
to the poor and hasten away, brush
ing their coat sleeves lest they be
contaminated by the proximity to pow
crty.
This one gives Charity that men
may point to him as a philanthropist,
that one to avoid critical comment,
and the third in an eleventh-hour eff
fort to save scared soul from He'll
and brighten a black memory.
The exploiter who wracks dollars
out of the wasted bodies of children
and gives part of the dollars to found
an orphan asylum is using Charity as
a mask for barbarous rapacity.
The man who overworks and under
pays men and women so that they
come to the feebleness of old age be-
fore their time, without the where
withal to clothe and feed themselves,
may make a great name for himself
as a philanthropist by giving money to
found an Old Folks Home, but he, too,
is rotten fraud, He is using Char
ity to cover sin.
The idle inheritors of family wealth
who give their old clothes to the poor,
contribute to the uplift Of the heath
en- and subscribe to benevolent propo-
sitions here and there, but still lead
lives Of useless frivolity and empty
amusement, spending 100000 for a
yacht and $500 to aid the blind, are
camoufaging with Charity. There is
no Love in it.
At best Charity is nothing but a
patch for a sore. 1t cures no social
disease; it merely covers it up to de-
ceive the passing eye, but the sore
under the patch, deprived of sunlight,
continues to grow worse. Eventually
no patch is big enough to cover it,
nor to kill the fetid odor.
AS a matter of fact, Charity-that
is, the giving of alms-has no place
in the world today. The necessity for
Charity is brought about by industrial
injustice. Remove that and the need
for almsgiving dies.
But defenders of the sort of the
Charity we have nowadays will ask:
What is to be done with the unfortun-
ate and the weak if the rich do not
give to the poor, regardless of mo-
tive?
The plain answer is that every man
capable of useful work ought always
to have the opportunity to get what
he needs through his own effort. If,
through natural incapacity or misfor-
tune, any individual cannot care for
himself, then Society, the State,
owes that person a living, and he
ought not be compelled to beg it or
accept it as bounty of any self-ad-
miring cxploiter Of other men.
Those who will not work through
sheer laziness should be taken in
hand by the State and educated. Sloth
and Indifference to labor are the re-
suits of ignorance. Charity merely
increases the number of loafers; ed
ucation will reduce them to the van
ishing point.
In some of the older countries they
order the affairs of humanity better
than we do in America. Take old-age
pensions now in force in at least two
European nations, for example. Fixed
sums are paid to aged and feeble
not as aims given by the
state, but as recognition of the fact
that the citizen who has labored 80
or 40 years producing articles for his
fellow-men has contributed enough to
the wealth of society to entitle him to
in his declining years.
There are objections to old-age
pensions, but in SO far as they recog-
nize the right of all men to be free
from the blight of Charity they are
on the right track.
In the New Era of Greater Human
ity, when labor receives a just share
in the products of it's labor, when de-
cency and the square deal take the
place of selfshness and cut-throat
in business, and when all
who would eat must work, the good
things of life will be so distributed
that all will have plenty. There will
be no such thing as capitalists with
800, 100000 on the one hand and fam
lies who cannot send children to school
because they are undernourished, on
the other; there will be no such thing
as idle parasites of inherited wealth,
in imported cars, whizzing by broken
down workers on the way to the poor
house. There will be wealth, lots of
it, but it will be divided among those
who produce things, and the division
will be such that the need for aims
giving will vanish.
"I AM MY BROTHERS, KEEPER -