in which charitable people are accustomed to send the
sick where they do not belong. The worst of it is that the sudden
change of climate and the impossibility of securing proper care, so far
from effecting a cure, in many cases hasten death. "The saddest thing
about the life of a Denver minister," writes Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, "is
the number of lonely funerals that he is called upon to attend. Often
I have been hastily summoned to say a prayer over some poor body at the
undertaker's {106} shop, where there would be present just the
undertaker and the minister, with perhaps the keeper of the
boarding-house where the lad died or an officer of the Charity
Organization Society. I look at the youthful victim of ignorant
good-will borne to his neglected grave, I imagine the mother and
sisters in the farmhouse on the New England hillside, whose tenderness
might have soothed his last hours, and I think with bitterness of the
well-meant but misdirected charity which condemned him to a miserable
exile and a forlorn death." [2]

It must be remembered that change of climate is helpful only in the
earlier stages of disease, and only then when the patient is able to
live in comparative comfort, free from worry and anxiety. To send
invalids to a strange place in the name of charity, without providing
them with the means of subsistence, is the refinement of cruelty.

Collateral Readings: Publications of local Board of Health.
Proceedings of International Congress of Charities, Chicago, 1893,
volume on "Hospitals, Dispensaries, {107} and Nursing." "Instructive
District Nursing," M. K. Sedgewick in "Forum," Vol. XXII, pp. 297 _sq_.
"The Feeble-minded," Dr. George H. Knight in Proceedings of
Twenty-second National Conference of Charities, pp. 150 _sq_. See also
discussion in same volume, pp. 460 _sq_. "The Care of Epileptics,"
William P. Letchworth in Proceedings of Twenty-third National
Conference of Charities, pp. 199 _sq_. "Industrial Education of
Epileptics," Dr. William P. Spratling in Proceedings of Twenty-fourth
National Conference of Charities, pp. 69 _sq_. "Destitute
Convalescents: After Care of the Insane," Dr. Richard Dewey in the
same, pp. 76 _sq_. See also discussion on pp. 464 _sq_.

[1] "American Charities," p. 40.

[2] Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference of Charities, Denver,
1892, pp. 91 _sq_.

{108}

CHAPTER VII

SPENDING AND SAVING

There is a new school of philanthropists that a