THE RESPONSIBILITY OF CHARITABLE APPEALS.
TWO special appeals for most deserving objects are now before the public,—an appeal for the widows and families of the lifeboat men who were lately drowned, and an appeal to make good the deficiency in the income of Guy's Hospital caused by the depressed state of landed pro- perty. No more excellent ways of spending money could be suggested. It is impossible to exaggerate the good which can be done in both of them. The crew of a lifeboat render personal service of the most devoted and valuable kind ; their lives are spent in saving the lives of others. It would be a terrible addition to their anxieties if they had to think how their wives and children would be supported, if, the next time they set off to succour a vessel, they should not come home alive. The handsome manner in which the appeal of the Mayor of Southport has been answered, makes it needless to entertain any fears of this sort in the case of the Southport and St. Anne's boatmen. Enough has been raised to secure a good provision for the families of the men who were lost, even if they all had families, which was far, we believe, from being the case. What will be done for Guy's Hospital is still to be seen. The sum asked for is four times as large—f100,000 —and the occasion of the demand is not so startling. Yet there is something in the spectacle of a great charity that has gone on for more than a century and a half doing good in a silent, stately way of its own, and asking no man for a penny, forced by an unavoidable loss of income to throw itself upon public benevolence, that will come home to many minds. No hospital has done, or is doing, better work than Guy's, and certainly none has a better right to be helped in doing equally good work in the future, now that it is no longer able to do it for itself.
Yet when appeals of this kind are suddenly made, it is impossible not to remember who will be the ultimate con- tributors to the new fund. That is a point, probably, which many of our readers have never considered. They think only of the additional purses that will be opened and the additional cheques that will be filled up. They rejoice, as they read of the growing subscription-lists, that so much more money has been consecrated to the service of humanity, instead of lying idle in the banks or swelling the donors' lists of investments. Their theory of the charitable resources of England is that they are an untraversed continent, in which each fresh call for money plays the part of a discoverer. This year, so many hospitals have been supported by private charity in London ; next year, there will be one more which, at least in part, will draw its supplies from the same perennial stream. This winter has been saddened by a terrible disaster, but for many years to come the families of the drowned will be kept from want by the generosity which has armed the Mayor of South- port with the funds he asked for. It is the one compensation for the constantly growing needs of our population that they are continually striking new veins of charitable munificence.
Are they ? Is there any reason to suppose that these new subscriptions to meet new demands are really drawn from new sources ? We greatly fear that to this question the answer must be " No!" The charitable resources of England are not an undiscovered continent ; they are rather a territory in which the boundaries are exactly mapped out, and each fresh settler can only be accommodated by taking a piece of his neighbour's land. Thus the ultimate contributors to these new needs will be the sufferers from the old needs. The more interesting, the more fashionable, the more novel charity, lives by what it sub- tracts from those already in being. Each new hospital stands for a corresponding contraction in the usefulness of other hospitals situate in the same district or ministering to the same disease. An additional special hospital takes away some- thing from the general hospitals. An additional general hospital takes away something from the special hospitals. They are unconscious rivals of one another. Even when the demand is of an unprecedented and exceptional kind, the same law ordinarily holds good. The figures of the Mansion House Fund of last winter could almost be given by adding up the deficits in the regular charities of London.
Nor is it wonderful that this should be the case. Money spent in charity is usually contributed by those who know what they are doing, and carry method even into their benevolence. The men who cannot say to-day how their money will be spent to-morrow, are not., as a matter of fact, the men who have any money to spare for other people. Their intentions may be excellent ; they may feel a passionate longing to relieve all the suffering they see ; but the means of relieving it are not there. The methodical man, on the other hand, has the money ; but then, its uses are already determined. So much of his income is set apart for benevolent uses, and the rest is otherwise apportioned. There are exceptions, of course, to this rule,—cases in which the calculations of the most orderly are upset by some sudden and pressing call, and men will give more than they can well afford in order not to leave that call unanswered. But these ex- ceptions are few. The rule is, that charities are supported by men the sum-total of whose benevolence varies little from year to year, and who meet new demands by a rearrangement of their replies to existing demands. The general charitable fund out of which subscriptions come is elastic enough between the four lines which bound it ; but the lines them- selves can be but very slightly stretched.
It follows from this that a heavy responsibility rests upon all who make new appeals to the national benevolence. It behoves them to remember that they are virtually appeals for a share in a fund already largely appropriated. It may be that the use to which it is proposed to put the money subtracted is a better use than that to which it is now turned. It may be, on the other hand, that the charity which will be crippled by the appearance of the new claimant is really the more deserving of the two, and anyhow, as no one can predict with any certainty in what quarter the deficit will make itself felt, it is impossible to feel any clear assurance upon the matter. There must be rivalry among charities as in all other depart- ments of human action ; but it can do no harm to place before those who are tempted to push it to extremes the real working of what they suppose to be an unmixed benefit to human sufferers, but what far more often is a benefit to one set of sufferers purchased at the expense of another set.
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