dentified
with their names; the paid officials connected with charities have
become a large and powerful profession, and their influence is naturally
used in the same direction; the many different religious bodies in the
country often refuse to combine, and each desires to have its own
institutions; and there are fashions in charity which, while they
greatly stimulate generosity, have too often the effect of diverting it
from the older and more unobtrusive forms. On the other hand, one of the
most important facts in our present economical condition is that an
extraordinary and almost unparalleled development of industrial
prosperity has been accompanied by extreme and long-continued
agricultural depression and by a great fall in the rate of interest.
Wealth in many forms is accumulating with wonderful rapidity, and the
increased rate of wages is diffusing prosperity among the working
classes; but those who depend directly or indirectly on agricultural
rents or on interest of money invested in trust securities have been
suffering severely, and they comprise some of the most useful,
blameless, and meritorious classes in the community. The same causes
that have injured them have fallen with crushing severity on
old-established institutions which usually derive their income largely
or entirely from the rent of land or from money invested in the public
funds. The bitter cry of distress that is rising from the hospitals and
many other ancient charities, from the universities, from the clergy of
the Established Church, abundantly proves it.

The preference, however, to be given to old charities rather than to new
ones is subject to very many exceptions. It does not apply to new
countries or to the many cases in which changes and developments of
industry have planted vast agglomerations of population in districts
which were once but thinly populated, and therefore but little provided
with charitable or educational institutions. Nor does it apply to the
many cases in which the circumstances of modern life have called into
existence new forms of charity, new wants, new dangers and evils to be
combated, new departments of knowledge to be cultivated. One of the
greatest difficulties of the older universities is that of providing,
out of their shrinking endowments, for the teaching of branches of
science and knowledge which have only come into existence, or at least
into prominence, long after these universities were established, an