, 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: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most
arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the
moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I
instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within reach
of a bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a state of things
in which no man will ever stand in need of any other man's help, but
will derive all his satisfaction from the great social tides which
own no individual names. I am sure no man can be put in a p