(3) A further steady damper upon our altruistic zeal is the dread of raising the taxes.  Humanitarian movements are well enough, but they cost so much!  What is needful is to point out that poverty, unemployment, disease, and the other social ills are also costly; indeed, they cost the public in the long run far more than the expenditure necessary for their abolition or alleviation.  It pays in dollars and cents, within a generation or two at least, to make and keep the social organism sound.  A wise altruism is not merely a matter of philanthropy; it is also a matter of economy; a means of saving individuals from suffering, but at the same time a means of safeguarding the public treasury.  If the community does not pay for the curing of these evils it will have to pay for their results.  “It seems to me essentially fallacious to look upon such expenditures as indulgences to be allowed rather sparingly to such communities as are rich enough to afford them.  They are literally a husbanding of resources, a safeguard against later unprofitable but compulsory expenditure, a repair in the social organism which, like the repair of a leaky roof, may avert disaster.” [Footnote:  E. T. Devine, Misery and its Causes, p. 272.] The public must be educated to see the wisdom of investing heavily in long-neglected social repairs and reconstruction, which in the end will far more than pay for itself in the lowering of expenses for police, courts, prisons, hospitals, asylums, and almshouses, in the lowered death-rate, immunity from costly disease, and increased working capacity of the people.

(4) Finally, a hopelessness of accomplishing anything often paralyzes our zeal.  This sometimes takes the form of a more or less honest conviction that poverty, unemployment, and other maladjustments are simply the result of moral degeneration-of the laziness, extravagance, drinking, or other wrongdoing of the poor; their suffering is their own fault, and they must be left to endure it.  Of course such factors often-though by no means always-enter in.  One may well say, “Who are we of the upper classes to throw the first stone?” Under like conditions most of us would have become as discouraged or demoralized, yielded to the consolation of some vice, or balked at the monotonous grind of factory labor.  But however that may be, in so far as social evils are due to these faults, the faults must be attacked, not accepted as inevitable and incurable.  The pressure that pushes men into them must be eased, the ignorance and foolishness that foster them must be dissipated by education and moral training.  And for all the social maladjustments that are not due to vice and sin, other remedies must be found.  The road to social salvation is long and beset with many difficulties, but the goal is not hopeless of attainment; and every step toward the goal is so much gain.  Because we cannot now see how to remedy all evils must not be a pretext for refusing to lend a hand to movements that are of proved value.