#Charity#

As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and
self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there must be
at home a large number of other women who live sterile and empty
lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their luckier
sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings; they have
emotions--or, in religious parlance, "souls;" it is necessary to
provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating the property of
their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming #enceinte.# So it
comes about that there are two cathedrals in New York: one, St. John
the Divine, for the society ladies, and the other, St. Patrick's, for
the servant-girls. The latter is located on Fifth Avenue, where its
towering white spires divide with the homes of the Vanderbilts the
interest of the crowds of sight-seers. Now, early every Sunday
morning, before "Good Society" has opened its eyes, you may see the
devotees of the Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each
with a little black prayer-book in her hand. What is it they do
inside? What are they taught about life? This is the question to which
we have next to give attention.

Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate of
New York, favored me with his justification of his own career and
activities. He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one man of
the world to another, he said: "The reason I put them into the hands
of Catholics is not religious, but because I find they are efficient
in such matters. They don't ask questions, they do what you want them
to do, and do it economically."

I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the
remark--like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his
mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.

When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long hours and
improper working-conditions which drove him to desperation; they do
not ask if police and politicians are getting a rake-off from the
saloon, or if traction magnates are using it as an agency for the
controlling of votes; they do not plunge into prohibition movements or
good government campaigns--they simply take the man in, at a standard
price, and the patient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and
then turn him out for society to make him drunk again. That is
"charity," and it is the special industry o