Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1912): 6.

All honor to the Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform Association, for his courageous denunciation of sentimental charity. Baltimoer has suffered from that sort of thing long enough. It is impossible to walk the streets without being pestered by children soliciting contributions to this or that fund; even in the barrooms a man is not at peace, for the frowsy wiskinskis of the warring Salvation Armies follow him there and bother him until he disgorges. And day in and day out the newspapers keep at him.

To what end? Does all this saturnalia of almsgiving accomplish any permanent good. Of course, it doesn’t. On the contrary, it makes incurable paupers of thousands of the poor, white and black. It teaches them to look to others for constant help. It makes them believe that the community owes them certain favors and comforts. It degrades and pollutes them beyond hope of cure. It opens the way for a doubling of pauperism tomorrow.

The answer of the sentimentalists, whenever any objection is made to their debauch of charity, is that human suffering, whatever its origin, deserves relief–that the pauper needs and enjoys a breath of country air as much as the man who works for a living–that, say what you will against adult beggars, their children, at least, should be taken care of. An evil mixture of piety and rubbish! Imagine the eventual outlook of children who are sent to the country by one charity, and fed with milk by another, and provided with free meals by a third, and cared for when they are sick by a fourth–and all with the full consent and approval of their parents! What sort of men and women will these children make tomorrow? Will they, in their turn, care for their children, or will they hand them over to almsgivers? I leave the answer to any sane man.

The Hon. Mr. Ogle’s objection, however, is not so much that charity is degrading as that it is useless. In the long run, he argues, it must needs do more harm than good. For one thing, it gives a false sense of security, by relieving a disease it cannot cure. And for another thing, it works against the prosperity of honest and hard-working folk, by exposing them to the competition of an assisted class. Give away soup, and wages will go down. Take care of paupers’ children, and the paupers will infallibly have more children. And so charity, instead of solving the problem fo pauperism, actually leaves it untouched.

A sound enough argument, but complicated, unfortunately, by the Hon. Mr. Ogle’s unrelated and undemonstrated schemes of tax reform. There remains an argument just as sound and without any strings to it–the argument, to wit, that the coddling of the hopelessly unfit is a dangerous and immoral enterprise, against which every true believer in human progress should set hsi face. No matter what the form of our social organization, there will always be people who are enormously less fit to survive than the average. With such folk we may deal in two ways. On the one hand, we may maintain them at the expense of the fit, and so let them propagate their kind and increase their number; and on the other hand, we may let the law of natural selection take its course. The first scheme is sentimental charity. The second is progress. The first lowers the average fitness of the whole race. The second raises the average fitness of the whole race.

Here, again, it is difficult to evade the gushing tears of sentimentality. The virtuosi of charity, true enough, are commonly willing to admit the evil uselessness of the typical able-bodied pauper of the sex male. They even advocate imprisoning him–i. e., enslaving him–and otherwise punishing him. But they weep for his poor wife and his ten children. These, at least, are innocent. They are the victims of crime and circumstance. They have done no wrong. It is society’s first duty to protect them and support them and keep them alive.

No wrong? Is that, after all, quite accurate? Did the mother do no wrong when she bore 10 children to a loafer, and so added 10 more members to the caste of the unfit? And will her children, nursed to maturity by charity, do right or wrong tomorrow, when they, in their turn, contribute recruits to that caste? No wrong, of course, in the narrow, statute-book sense. No wrong comparable to picking a pocket, or smoking on a street car, or selling chewing gum on Sunday. No wrong against petty moralities. But the worst of all imaginable wrongs against the human race and human progress–the one, unforgiveable wrong against all who do useful labor in the world and try their best to pay their way.

Don’t fancy that I here argue against all charity, that I propose any wholesale massacre of the unfit. For one thing, sentimentality is too strong upon us to make so frank a yielding to natural laws possible. And for another thing, intelligent charity is necessary and healthful. It is quite proper for the strong man to help lift up the weak man, and it is not only proper but also profitable to the race. Every one of us, at some time or another, needs charity. Every one of us needs help over rough places–not help brought with money, but help given freely out of mercy and kindness. But it is one thing to hold out a hand to the man knocked down in the strife, and so to put him on his legs again–and quite another thing to hold up, day in and day out, the man who has no legs, or who, having them, is too lazy to use them. In brief, there is a vast difference between charity which really remedies and charity which merely ameliorates–and the danger of the former lies precisely in the fact that it always tends to become the latter.

What sort have we in Baltimore? We have both sorts–but sentimentality is constantly pulling toward the second. The one general charitable organization among us which makes a genuine effort to differentiate sharply between the pauper worth helping and the pauper not worth helping is the Federated Charities–and one seldom hears the Federated Charities mentioned save in terms of opprobrium. It is accused of being heartless, cruel, cold. Would that it were more cruel, more cold–and would that the sentimental charities which now impede and sentimentalize its work could be brought under its intelligent authority! If they were, there would be much less cadging for contributions in Baltimore–and much less incurable poverty.

The estimable Democratic Telegram: the super-Mahon’s false whiskers.

A progressive is any City Councilman who has got left on jobs.