not in a city home. Though we still have inebriates there we are preparing to get rid of them. The projected state farm for vagrants may also take away that type. In that case the next few years may see the city home a home in fact as well as in name, and the process of breaking up and abolishing the almshouse will then be practically complete.

A few illustrations will give an idea of the extent of the department's work. I venture to say that New York city is really the greatest philanthropist in the world. Through the commissioner of charities it spends annually for the care of the poor almost eleven million dollars. If you add to this expenditure the budget of the departments of Bellevue and allied hospitals and the health department hospital, where the poor also are cared for, the board of inebriates and the ambulance board, you get the enormous total of seventeen million dollars a year spent for the care of the poor. This does not include expenditures for social welfare work such as education, recreation, public baths and like activities maintained for the health, comfort and general development of the people. The budget of all the activities which might be broadly considered as welfare work of the greater city amount to the stupendous sum of sixty million dollars a year. This almost exactly equals the total amount Andrew Carnegie has spent throughout his entire life and throughout the world for libraries. Large as is the expenditure of the department of charities, I want to impress upon you the fact that that department does not include by any means all the social welfare work of the city.

The total number of public dependants being cared for by the city of New York at present aggregates more than fifty-four thousand, a number greater than the entire population of the city of Binghamton, N. Y. If the commissioner of charities should attempt to inspect all the public and private institutions to which the city commits its wards, and should inspect a building a day, at the end of a year he would not quite have finished his tour of inspection. If he decided to serve two eggs a week for breakfast to all the people he is feeding in public institutions alone he would add twenty-three thousand dollars to his food budget. If he should add one more little square of butter per day to each person's food allowance, he would add thirty-four thousand dollars a year

to his budget. If he should give these old and sick people an extra cup of coffee he must ask the city to appropriate fifty-four thousand dollars additional. I cite these illustrations simply to give you some idea of the magnitude of our work.

The past few years have witnessed great improvement in municipal government and a corresponding improvement has taken place in public charities. Within the past twenty years the first public institution for the care of tuberculosis has been established, the first municipal lodging house has opened its doors to the homeless, the first public bath house has been erected. the first farm colony for inebriates has been developed, state care ror the insane and protection and segregation of the feeble-minded have become fixed policies, public pensions for widowed mothers have been established in twenty-two states. One by one the various groups of the unfortunate and afflicted formerly gathered together in the almshouse have been segregated in appropriate places. In this whole movement New York has taken a conspicuous part.

The expenditure of over ten million dollars a year by the department of charities does not mean that New York is a city of paupers. It does not mean that we have a greater proportion of native dependants than other great cities in the world, although our enormous immigration does place upon us a unique and unjust burden which should be borne in part at least by the national government. It does not mean that New York is an unhealthful city, for our death rate compares favorably with that of other large cities. It does not mean that we have an excess number of feeble-minded persons or that insanity is more prevalent here than elsewhere. What, then, is the significance of this vast expenditure of the greatest of all philanthropists? It means that the city of New York has recognized its obligation to provide proper care and treatment for the insane, to segregate and protect the feeble-minded, to make their crippled lives as happy as possible under the circumstances, to make them as nearly self-supporting as may be, and, as we continue to value human life, to keep them from reproducing their kind. It means that the city has recognized its obligation to cure tuberculosis and to take proper measures for the prevention of that disease, to give shelter to the homeless

and to spread the wing of protection over the orphans and abandoned children.

Show me the city that boasts of having no poverty and prates of its meager expenses for welfare work and I will show you the city that suffers social stagnation, the city that is sending its tuberculous citizens to pest-houses, its homeless men to jail, its motherless children to the old-fashioned orphan asylum and its childless old women over the hills to the poor-house.

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I

DISCUSSION OF CHARITIES AND CORRECTION

EDWARD T. DEVINE

Professor of Social Economy, Columbia University

HOPE it will not be regarded as partisan politics for me to say that so far as this greatest city on the western continent is concerned, Mr. Bryce's reproach that the one conspicuous failure in America is its municipal government has been for the time being completely removed. In the non-partisan, socially minded administration which we are receiving at the present time from Mayor Mitchel and his associates in the board of estimate and apportionment and from the commissioners whom he has placed at the head of his city departments, we are having a conspicuous success. The spirit of this administration is admirably embodied in the two commissioners who have spoken to you this afternoon, Dr. Davis and Commissioner Kingsbury, who have shown what it is to transform the routine administration of institutions into the dynamic promotion of social progress.

When Mayor Mitchel was speaking of the various departments in that extraordinary and admirable address which he made on Monday evening, he said of the department of correction that the trouble has been in the past that it has been corruptive instead of correctional, and he might have added of the department of charities that the trouble is that in the past it has too often been pauperizing instead of redemptive. It has been the task of Commissioner Davis to show that a department of correction may be really correctional and not corruptive; and of Commissioner Kingsbury to show that a department of charities may be really redemptive and not pauperizing. Florence Nightingale pointed out many years ago that a hospital, whatever else you ask of it, shall at any rate not make people sick, and yet that is what the hospitals of her childhood were doing. Typhus was a common disease acquired in the hospital. Is it not equally elementary that a correctional institution should not be corruptive and a department of charities should be preventive of poverty and dependence and its institutions should be redemptive? Mayor Mitchel said that at the beginning of his administration he instructed Commissioner Kingsbury, who would indeed have needed no such instruction, that the department of charities as a whole should concern itself primarily with preventive work, with a study of the causes and the prevention of dependence.

As for Commissioner Davis's reforms in the department of correction, while we rejoice in the removal of those institutions entirely from Blackwell's Island in order that a higher and reformative type of institution may take the place of the prisons, we shall be satisfied with nothing less than the complete and entire abolition of the prison in the old sense. There is no need for a prison among our social institutions. What we need is a hospital for people so defective mentally or physically that they cannot take care of themselves in society; and a colony for those who must be cared for continuously because they cannot be trusted at large. We need, on the other hand, educational institutions, i. e., real reformatories, for those who are capable of reform.

In the same way we need in the department of charities not an almshouse at all in the old sense, but a series of specialized institutions. Commissioner Kingsbury has told you that the almshouse itself has already in large degree become that because of the removal of various classes one after another, so that we have left finally a home for the aged and infirm, which is as much a specialized institution as the home for inebriates or the children's home or the various other institutions that one after another have been created out of the department of charities.

We are not simply to administer institutions that have been bequeathed to us. We are to conceive a problem of education and of social solution. Whether the term of office be long or short, administrators may be expected to make some contribution toward that social progress the spirit of which inspires and animates these two departments whose work has been so admirably described to you by their commissioners.

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