There is no need here to criticize the obvious limitations of organized charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution.  We are all familiar with these criticisms:  the common indictment of “inefficiency” so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies.  The charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization of deserving poor, and the encouragement and fostering of the “undeserving”; the progressive destruction of self-respect and self-reliance by the paternalistic interference of social agencies; the impossibility of keeping pace with the ever-increasing multiplication of factors and influences responsible for the perpetuation of human misery; the misdirection and misappropriation of endowments; the absence of interorganization and coordination of the various agencies of church, state, and privately endowed institutions; the “crimes of charity” that are occasionally exposed in newspaper scandals.  These and similar strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in modern civilization.  In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the evils of poverty and the menace to the race engendered by misery and filth.

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism.  It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect.  Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment.  Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.  My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the “failure” of philanthropy, but rather at its success.

These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice.  Readers of Huxley’s attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era.  One of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or seventy years ago wrote: