Relation Between Private and Public Charities.

MR. ALEXANDER JOHNSON, NEW YORK CITY.

I want for a moment to have you know the people whom we call poor. Here we are in our own prosperous communities with plenty of work to do. We draw our salaries, we get our wages at the end of the week to support our families. We have our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, friends and neighbors, and if we get into distress, if sickness comes, if anything of that kind happens, we get a friend to come and help us. Jane comes in if we are sick; Uncle John comes and helps if we need money for a payment on the house, and on the whole the great majority of people have a good, blessed time; with all this work we have a great deal of pleasure and enjoyment. Now in this orderly community of people you will find some who are not as we are. In some way they have gotten out of harmony with their surroundings. We call those people poor. those people? The trouble is they are out of their proper social relationWhat is the matter with ship. They need some sort of guidance. They have no proper place in an orderly community. The thing for all of us to do with a person in that condition, who is dependent, is not to be thinking about giving him material things, but to help him to some sort of orderly place in society. As soon as he has some kind of employment, as soon as he meets with friends and gets into a settled, orderly way of life he is no longer poor. The most important thing to remember while you are doing this sort of thing is that we must make our helpfulness for this person show in the right direction. Years ago in the Middle West, in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, there were a vast number of people travelling aimlessly through the country. would come and ask for help. They would beg around town for a little while, and then the township trustee would give them a ticket to the next county seat, the county seats being perhaps twenty to twenty-five miles apart. A man or woman would be sent to the next county seat, and so they would go traveling along month after month and year after year, getting more pauperized and weaker and debilitated, and after a few years of that kind of life they were fit for nothing else. After awhile in one or two of our states the people began to realize what a foolish plan it was to send those people around from one place to another, and how utterly wasteful it was. I had a man come to me in Cincinnati who was almost blind.

They

He said he

wanted to go to St. Louis where he had a mother who would take care of
him. He claimed to be a railroad engineer. He said he came from Worces-
ter, Massachusetts, and had been to Philadelphia and to Albany.
something about Philadelphia and about his travels, and from what I
I asked
learned I figured out that that man had been costing the United States
$3.25 a day for transportation. They did a foolish thing to send a man

wandering about like that. I sent him to a lodging house I was connected
with and told him to stay there until he heard from me again. Meanwhile
he had found some so-called benevolent individual who had bought him a
ticket and he left town. That sort of farce relief work is going on to a
large extent. It is a shiftless, aimless, undignified way of doing this work.
The people we in America help cannot help themselves. We investigate
each case, look into the character and condition and satisfy ourselves that
the applicants are unable to earn their own living, and prompted by the
humane sentiment in our hearts we give them reasonable comforts. I
should be very sorry to see accepted the English theory that destitution
alone is a sufficient right for relief. How shall we deal with those people
who are in a position where they must be helped? I think one of the most
important things we have to do is to get the right basis in co-operation.
This is a magnificent word, the finest word in the dictionary.
What we
need is a concensus of opinion on this question of charitable help to see
how we can best work together. One of the things we meet in the admin-
istration of charities is that every once in a while we are confronted with a
special case. The law is usually tolerably specific to say what should be
done and it will not fit the special case. But there is in almost every city
and in every town, a charity fund that can be appealed to. Our dear old
leader in Illinois used to say that the strongest bank in the world has never
had a properly drawn draft presented but what the drawer has received
full value, and that bank is the bank of human sympathy; you can depend
on it every time. This suggests how to deal with the special case.

There are not so many imposters, that is a mistake. But when those
unfortunates ask for help, instead of being helped, instead of giving that
kind of help that would make such a person over into a man again, he is
often made permanently helpless. If the man is given money he is generally
thereby pushed toward permanent dependency. He never will be able to
pull himself up to the point of helping himself.

I want to tell you about one of my most distinguished converts. At that time he was vice-president of the First National bank, afterwards he became secretary of the treasury; I think he is now in New York. At that time he and I were both members of a society or club, called the Bureau of Justice. The object of that bureau was to take up cases of people who were being robbed or defrauded in the name of the law. For instance, in the chattel mortgage business. You borrow twenty-five dollars on your furniture, the goods remaining in your house. You pay usually about five per cent per month interest. In three months you probably pay back about fifteen dollars, and then you give a new note for twenty-five dollars, with a new mortgage, and they charge you five dollars for making out a new set of papers and ten dollars commission and other charges of that kind. In one particular case I had seen the man borrow $25, pay back $75 and still owe $125. The bureau of justice took up cases of that kind. I was the superintendent. Mr. Gage wanted to know one day how we were getting along with the society. I told him pretty well, our chief difficulty was that our own members did not use us. He said he knew how it was himself, a

1

man had been in his office yesterday and he hesitated a long time as to what he should do. I asked him what kind of a case it was. was a first-rate case; he was a working man and had a wife and two He said it children, he had no work and wanted a dollar to buy something for his family. I said, “Did you give him the dollar?" I said, "How long do you think a man with a wife and a couple of children "Yes," he said, "I did." can live in Chicago on a dollar?" Well, he said he could not investigate every case that came to him. I said, "That man in all the years of his life never earned a dollar except by three or four hours' hard work, but here he got a dollar of you for just a few minutes' talk. You did not help him over his emergency, you did not make him able to get along without anybody's else help, but you made him understand he could not get along without that dollar." I said, "Don't you see the consequences? Don't you see that you are going to pauperize him? Don't you see that you are giving him the first push down hill?" He said, "What would you have done if he had been sent to you?" I said, "I do not know. Every man that comes to me I have to treat by himself; I cannot do it in a wholesale way. tell you of a case I had four weeks ago. I want to children. He came to me and asked me if I would help an Englishman in The man had a wife and two distress. This man came close from where I used to live, and he told how mortified he was to beg and how hard he would work if he had it. 'John, why don't you go to work?' 'Where is a fellow going to get work in this town?' he asked. I said. 'I have got work for you.' about the wife and children?' he asked. them. I called up by telephone and got John a job till noon. I told him I would the North side office and said, 'Go to North Wells street, find Mrs. Miller, take her and the children to a restaurant and give them dinner." My agent found the woman and two children, took them to the restaurant and then let them go back. John got a job of cleaning, whitewashing a cellar and earned $1.75 cash in hand that day. That would pay the expenses of that night and the next morning. For three days he got odd jobs and after that he got steady work. John was properly helped and the whole expense was just thirty-five cents. That did not take much gray matter at all." Mr.

I said,

'But what take care of I called up

Gage replied, "I will be more careful hereafter." have a relief society or organization. He said, "you ought to poor man or woman comes to you and asks you for help send them to me. "No, I said, "Mr. Gage if some He gave me a check for $25 and said, "you keep this yourself and help some more of those cases. That money lasted three years before it was used up, and it would not have been used up in that time if it had not been for the chattel mortgage business. I used the last ten dollars for that pur

pose.

I have spoken of the relief end of it. Let me tell you how this applies to some other departments. Let me take for example the work of the training school for boys. What is the most difficult thing to do in connection with the work of such a training school as you have here? It is not discipline of the boys in the school; it is not teaching them to be industrious and to be good fellows in the institution, but it is to get them ready for the right

place when they leave the institution.

That is the most critical time in the boy's life. If that boy at that critical time gets into the hands of a 'man of character, of stability, a man whose example it would be safe for a boy to imitate, in nine cases out of ten that boy's future is assured. he goes back to his vicious and wicked surroundings, the probability is that the boy will relapse and go back to the institution for another trial.

But if

In the same way I might speak to you along the line of the reformatory. The difficult time is when they go out. In the reformatory they are watched, they are under discipline, they are under good influence, they are taught to do the right thing. When they go out and find the right kind of man to deal with them, there is little danger of relapse, but if they do not get that sort of treatment and surroundings, there is danger all the time, no matter how well the work was done in the reformatory.

We often have the opportunity to do that. We often have the opportunity to give a helping hand in such a case and co-operate with the public authorities. You want a boy; well, take one of these boys. When you take him there is a big responsibility resting upon you. That boy will do what you do, a great deal more than you have any idea of; he will imitate anything you do. These are the things in which we can help. We can help out by co-operation. You know what that means, my friends. It means the people of the state are interested in the work the state is doing. People recognize the value of the men whom you employ at the head of your hospitals for the insane and at the head of your correctional institutions; splendid men they are, and I have known many of them for years. They stand mighty well, let me tell you. They want and need our co-operation. We should help them in every possible way. If you have work for a man let Mr. Randall know it; if for a boy let Mr. Whittier know it. Do not take advantage of those cases because they have had hard luck. Treat them fairly and squarely, give every man a square deal. Let us do it because we want to do our share of it.

The Indeterminate Sentence.

MR. HENRY WOLFER, WARDEN MINNESOTA STATE PRISON, STILLWATER. The Indeterminate Sentence in its broadest sense, as I understand it, is a sentence imposed on all convicted of crime whether first offenders or not, the crime of murder excepted, leaving the time limit to be tentatively determined later on, or after the offender (not the crime) has been carefully studied and analyzed by a competent tribunal.

The Indeterminate Sentence scheme embodies as one of its basic principles that the individual offender and not the crime shall finally determine the length of confinement or detention that is necessary to reform him, and to secure the greatest degree of protection to society. This means a careful analysis of his physical, mental and moral status in order to determine

how long it is necessary for him to remain in prison, rather than the measuring out of so much punishment for a given amount of crime. It seeks to regenerate the criminal, to readjust him to the requirements of society's laws and customs, so that he may be safely released on probation. It predicates that the crime shall not be considered, except for the purpose of determining the culprit's turpitude, emphasis being placed upon the saving qualities of the individual-the man, or what there is left of him. The scientific application of the principles of the Indeterminate Sentence means, or implies, that the offender shall always be released on probation or parole, and that such tentative release shall come to him gradually and only after he has given reasonable evidence of his desire and purpose to live honestly and obey the law. It means that his treatment in prison shall tend to break down and eradicate the vicious and criminal traits of his character and build up and strengthen the best elements of his nature. The princi ples involved in the Indeterminate Sentence and the parole system are one and the same, and are inseparable. Both are in harmony with the spirit of God's law and embody the highest possible degree of human justice and humanity in dealing with the criminal class. Probation, or parole, cannot be scientifically applied to the convicted criminal save and except through the Indeterminate Sentence. so well, and so much better than I can describe them, by our late deceased Its original and basic principles are described friend, CharltonT. Lewis, at the National Prison Association at Louisville, Ky., on "The Future of Probation" that I would like to quote him briefly. "Probation," he says, “is, conformity to the law of humanity, the law of the universe, the law of the Creator. Evey human being born into this world is a fresh experiment of God. Every human being born into this world presents a novel problem of destiny, to be solved by future events, and those future events, by the decree of the Creator, depend upon the will, the action, the life, the voluntary work of the being himself. being placed upon earth is placed on probation, to work out his own desEvery human tiny under the supervision of the Supreme Probation Officer of the universe. The analogy is not without force. It involves the principle upon which we are acting when we apply the theory of probation to our fellow men.

Can a learned judge, though he be as wise as King Solomon; can any human being however much he may be blest with wisdom within the scope of the finite, measure a crime and the human being that committed it and cast them into the mold of human Justice? Can the main springs of the intricate human mechanism be discovered and measured accurately and justly in the brief space of time usually allotted by a trial court? Is it possible under this unfavorable environment with such limited opportunity to study, weigh, and analyze the culprit's character, measure his stature mentally, physically and morally and pronounce a just sentence? done (except in rare instances) without working a great injustice? I Can it be believe that its successful accomplishment is beyond the power of human intelligence. It would require infinite wisdom. prison for a fixed term? It may take only a brief space of time to cure him, Then why send him to and it may take a life time. One thing is certain and upon this point we