nthusiasm; but the question of means demands new
thought and the exercise of different faculties.

There are many radical difficulties, in organizing practical charities,
which are exceedingly hard to overcome.

Charities, to be permanent and efficient, must be organized with as much
exactness and order as business associations, and carry with them
something of the same energy and motives of action. But the tendency, as
is well known from European experience, of all old charities, is to
sluggishness, want of enterprise, and careless business arrangement, as
well as to mechanical routine in the treatment of their subjects. The
reason of this is to be found in the somewhat exceptional abnormal
position--economically considered--of the worker in fields of
benevolence. All laborers in the intellectual and moral field are
exposed to the dangers of routine. But in education, for instance, and
the offices of the Church, there is a constant and healthy competition
going on, and certain prizes are held out to the successful worker,
which tend continually to arouse his faculties, and lead him to invent
new methods of attaining his ends. The relative want of this among the
Catholic clergy may be the cause of their lack of intellectual activity,
as compared with the Protestant.

In the management of charities there is a prevailing impression that
what may be called "interested motives" should be entirely excluded. The
worker, having entered the work under the enthusiasm of humanity, should
continue buoyed up by that enthusiasm. His salary may be seldom changed.
It will be ordinarily beneath that which is earned by corresponding
ability outside. No rewards of rank or fame are held out to him. He is
expected to find his pay in his labor.

Now there are certain individuals so filled with compassion for human
sufferings, or so inspired by Religion, or who so much value the
offering of respect returned by mankind for their sacrifices, that they
do not need the impulse of ordinary motives to make their work as
energetic and inventive and faithful as any labor under the motives of
competition and gain.

But the great majority of the instruments and agents of a charity are
not of this kind. They must have something of the common inducements of
mankind held out before them. If these be withdrawn, they become
gradually sluggish, uninventive, inexact, and lacking in the necessary
enterprise and ardor.

The agents of the old endowed cha