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present by the poor is the humanization of the Poor Law, an end which is retarded by all attempts to supplant it by private benevolence. Take, for example, the hard case of the aged poor, who are not beggars at all, but veterans of industry who have in most cases earned an honorable pension (which we are dishonest enough to grudge them) by a lifetime of appalling drudgery. We have to deal with at least 350,000 of them every year. Very little can be done by private efforts to rescue these unfortunate people from the barbarity of the ratepayers by building a few almshouses here and there. But a great deal can be done by arousing the public conscience and voting for reasonably humane and enlightened persons at elections of guardians. The guardians of the West Derby (Liverpool) Union, instead of imprisoning aged couples separately and miserably in their workhouse, put them into furnished cottages, where, provided they keep them neat and clean, they are no more interfered with than if they were in a private almshouse. The difference in happiness, comfort, and self-respect, between the cottage and the workhouse, is enormous: the difference in cost is less than two shillings a week per pair. If a millionaire must build almshouses, he had better do it by offering to defray the cost of a set of cottages on condition that the guardians adopt the West Derby system. This, of course, is pauperizing the ratepayer; but the average ratepayer is a quite shameless creature, loud in his outcry against the immorality of pauperizing any one at his expense, but abject in his adulation of the rich man who will pauperize him by those subscriptions to necesssary public institutions which act as subsidies in relief of the rates.

Never Endow Hospitals.

Hospitals are the pet resource of the rich man whose money is burning a hole in his pockets. Here, however, the verdict of sound. social economy is emphatic. Never give a farthing to an ordinary hospital. An experimental hospital is a different thing: a millionaire who is interested in proving that the use of drugs, of animal food, of alcohol, of the knife in cancer, or the like, can be and should be dispensed with, may endow a temporary hospital for that purpose; but in the charitable hospital, private endowment and private management mean not only the pauperization of the ratepayer, but irresponsibility, waste and extravagance checked by spasmodic stinginess, favoritism, almost unbridled licence for experiments on patients by scientifically enthusiastic doctors, and a system of begging for letters of admission which would be denounced as intolerable if it were part of the red tape of a public body. A safe rule for the millionaire is never to do anything for the public, any more than for an individual, that the public will do (because it must) for itself without his intervention. The provision of proper hospital accommodation is pre-eminently one of these things. Already more than a third of London's hospital accommodation is provided by the ratepayers. In Warrington the hospital rate, which was 2d. in the pound in 1887-8, rose in five years to 1s. 2d. If a billionaire had.

interposed to take this increase on his own shoulders, he would have been simply wasting money for which better uses were waiting, demoralizing his neighbors, and forestalling good hospitals by bad ones. Our present cadging hospital system will soon go the way of the old Poor Law; and no invalid will be a penny the worse.

Be Careful in Endowing Education.

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Education comes next to hospitals in the popular imagination as a thoroughly respectable mark for endowments. But it is open to the same objections. The privately endowed elementary school is inferior to the rate-supported one, and is consequently nothing but a catchpit in which children, on the way to their public school, are caught and condemned to an inferior education in inferior buildings under sectarian management. University education is another matter. But whilst it is easy to found colleges and scholarships, it is impossible to confine their benefits to those who are unable to pay for them. Besides, it is beginning to be remarked that university men, as a class, are specially ignorant and misinformed. The practical identity of the governing class with the university class in England has produced a quite peculiar sort of stupidity in English policy, the masterstrokes of which are so very frequently nothing but class solecisms that even the most crudely democratic legislatures of the Colonies and the most corrupt lobbies of the United States are superior to ours in directness and promptitude, sense of social proportion, and knowledge of contemporary realities. intelligent millionaire, unless he is frankly an enemy of the human race, will do nothing to extend the method of caste initiation practised under the mask of education at Oxford and Cambridge. Experiments in educational method, and new subjects of technical education, such, for instance, as political science considered as part of the technical education of the citizen (who is now such a disastrously bungling amateur in his all-important political capacity as voter by grace of modern democracy); or economics, statistics, and industrial history, treated as part of the technical commercial education of the wielder of modern capitals and his officials: these, abhorrent to university dons and outside the scope of public elementary education, are the departments in which the millionaire interested in education can make his gold fruitful. Help nothing that is already on its legs is not a bad rule in this and other matters. It is the struggles of society to adapt itself to the new conditions which every decade of modern industrial development springs on us that need help. The old institutions, with their obsolete routine, and their lazy denials and obstructions in the interests of that routine, are but too well supported already.

Endowing Societies.

The objection to supplanting public machinery by private does not apply to private action to set public machinery in motion. Take, for example, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. If that society were to undertake the punishį.

ment of cruel parents by building private prisons and establishing private tribunals, even the most thoughtless subscriber to private charities and hospitals would shake his head and button up his pocket, knowing that there are public laws and public prisons and tribunals to do the work, and that they alone should be trusted with such functions. But here the public machinery requires the initiative of an aggrieved person to set it in motion; and when the aggrieved person is a child, and its "next friend" the aggressor, the machinery does not get started. Under such circumstances, Mr. Waugh's society, by stepping in and taking the child's part, does a great deal of good; and this, observe, not by supplanting the State, or competing with it, but by co-operating with it and compelling it to do its duty. Generally speaking, all societies which are of the nature of Vigilance Committees are likely to be useful. The odium which attaches to the name came from the old-fashioned American Vigilance Committee, which, in the true spirit of private enterprise, not only detected offenders, but lynched them on its own responsibility. We have certain State vigilance officers: sanitary inspectors, School Board visitors, a Public Prosecutor (of a sort), the Queen's Proctor, and others. The only one of these who is an unmitigated public nuisance is the censor of the theatre, who, instead of merely having power to hale the author of an obnoxious play before a public tribunal, has power to sentence him to suppression and execute him with his own hands and on his own responsibility, with the result that our drama is more corrupt, silly, and indecent than any other department of fine art, and our unfortunate censor more timid and helpless than any other official. His case shows the distinction which it is essential to observe in vigilance work. But though we have an official to prevent Tolstoy's plays from being performed, we have no official to prevent people from stealing public land and stopping up public footpaths. The millionaire who gives money to "Days in the Country" for city children, and will not help Commons Preservation Societies and the like to keep the country open for them, is unworthy of his millions.

All these considerations point in the same direction. The intelligent millionaire need not hesitate to subsidize any vigilance society or reform society that is ably conducted, and that recognizes the fact that it is not going to reform the world, but only, at best, to persuade the world to take its ideas into consideration in reforming itself. Subject to these conditions, it matters little whether the millionaire agrees with the society or not. No individual or society can possibly be absolutely and completely right; nor can any view or theory be so stated as to comprise the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A millionaire who will not subsidize forces that are capable of a mischievous application will subsidize nothing at all. Such justice as we attain in our criminal courts is the outcome of a vehemently partial prosecution and defence; and all parliamentary sanity is the outcome of a conflict of views. For instance, if we try to figure to ourselves a forcible reconstruction of society on lines rigidly deduced either from the Manchester School or from State Socialism

we are at a loss to decide which of the two would be the more intolerable and disastrous. Yet who hesitates on that account, if such matters interest him, to back up the Fabian Society on the one hand, or the Personal Rights Association on the other, according to his bias? Our whole theory of freedom of speech and opinion for all citizens, rests, not on the assumption that everybody is right, but on the certainty that everybody is wrong on some point on which somebody else is right, so that there is a public danger in allowing anybody to go unheard. Therefore, any propagandist society which knows how to handle money intelligently and which is making a contribution to current thought, whether Christian or Pagan, Liberal or Conservative, Socialist or Individualist, scientific or humanitarian, physical or metaphysical, seems to me an excellent mark for a millionaire's spare money.

Yet after all, mere societies are good marks for anybody's spare money. Most of them may be left to the ordinary guinea subscriber; and though millionaires are such inveterate subscribers and donors that I dare not leave the societies out of account, I confess I despise a millionaire who dribbles his money away in fifties and hundreds, thereby reducing himself to the level of a mere crowd of ordinary men, instead of planking down sums that only a millionaire can. My idea of a millionaire is a man who never gives less than ten thousand pounds, ear-marked for the purchase of something of the best quality costing not a penny less than that amount. The millionaire should ask himself what is his favorite subject? Has it a school, with scholarships for the endowment of research and the attraction of rising talent? Has it a library, or a museum? If not, then he has an opening at once for his ten thousand or hundred thousand.

Starting Snowballs.

There is always something fascinating to the imagination of a very poor man in the notion of leaving a million or so to accumulate at compound interest for a few centuries, and then descend in fabulous riches on some remote descendant and make a Monte Cristo of him. Now, even if there were likely to be any particular point in being Monte Cristo after a couple of hundred years further social and industrial development, a modern millionaire, for the reasons already stated, should be the last person in the world to be much impressed by it. Still, the underlying idea of keeping a great money force together, multiplying it, and finally working a miracle with it, is a tempting one. Here is a recent example, quoted from a local paper:

"The gift of a farm to the Parish Council of St. Bees by the Rev. Mr. Pagan, of Shadforth, Durham, is accompanied by some peculiar conditions. The farm is 33a. 3r. 2p. in extent, and is valued at £1,098. The rent of the farm is to be allowed to accumulate, with two reservations. Should the grantor ever require it, the council may be called upon during his lifetime to pay him from time to time out of the accumulated investments any amounts not exceeding £1,098. Not more than 10 may be spent in charity, but not in relief of the rates. The balance is to be invested in land and houses until all the land and houses in the parish have been secured by the parish council. When that is accomplished, the sum of £1,098 may be handed over to some adjacent parish, which shall deal with the gift similarly to St. Bees."

Beware of the Ratepayer and the Landlord.

In the above bequest, we have a remarkable combination of practical sagacity and colossal revolutionary visionariness. Mr. Pagan sets a thousand pound snowball rolling in such a way as to nationalize the land parish by parish until the revolution is complete. Observe-and copy-his clause, "not in relief of the rates." Let the millionaire never forget that the ratepayer is always lying in wait to malversate public money to the saving of his own pocket. Possibly the millionaire may sympathize with him, and say that he wishes to relieve him. But in the first place a millionaire should never sympathize with anybody: his destiny is too high for such petty self-indulgence; and in the second, you cannot relieve the ratepayer by reducing, or even abolishing, his rates, since freeing a house of rates simply raises the rent. The millionaire might as well leave his money direct to the landlords at once. In fact, the ratepayer is only a foolish catspaw for the landlord, who is the great eater-up of public bequests. At Tonbridge, Bedford, and certain other places, pious founders have endowed the schools so splendidly that education is nobly cheap there. But rents are equivalently high; so that the landlords reap the whole pecuniary value of the endowment. The remedy, however, is to follow the example of the Tonbridge and Bedford founders instead of avoiding it. If every centre of population were educationally endowed with equal liberality, the advantage of Bedford would cease to be a differential one; and it is only advantages which are both differential and pecuniarily realizable by the individual citizens that produce rent. Meanwhile, the case points to another form of the general rule above deduced for the guidance of millionaires: namely, that bequests to the public should be for the provision of luxuries, never of necessaries. We must provide necessaries for ourselves; and their gratuitous provision in any town at present constitutes a pecuniarily realizable differential advantage in favor of living in that town. Now, a luxury is something that we need not have, and consequently will not pay for except with spare or waste money. Properly speaking, therefore, it is something that we will not pay for at all. And yet nothing is more vitally right than the attitude of the French gentleman who said: "Give me the luxuries of life, and I will do without the necessaries." For example, the British Library of Political Science is prodigiously more important to our well-being than a thousand new charitable soup-kitchens; but as ordinary people do not care a rap about it, it does not raise the rent of even students' lodgings in London by a farthing. But suppose a misguided billionaire, instead of founding an institution of this type, were to take on himself the cost of paving and lighting some London parish, and set on foot a free supply of bread and milk! All that would happen would be that the competition for houses and shops in that parish would rage until it had brought rents up to a point at which there would be no advantage in living in it more than in any other parish. Even parks and open spaces raise rents in London, though, strange to say,

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