Concerning the comptroller's indictments of certain charitable societies and organizations as expensive mechanisms for the consumption of appropriations or contributions largely spent upon their salaried officials, I am quite willing to recognize the force of Professor Giddings's demurrer to the effect that a so-called charitable society may now and then rightly exist, and expend its income largely, if not wholly, upon the persons whom it employs as its agents, since these agents are the vigilant committees whose office it is to detect, discourage, and expose unworthy objects, whether of public or private charity. But that, besides such agencies, there are constantly called into being wholly spurious organizations, which profess to exist for the relief of certain classes of sufferers or of needy people; that these succeed, sooner or later, in fastening themselves upon the treasury of the city and of the State; and that they are, in a great many cases, monuments of the most impudent and unscrupulous fraud, there can be no smallest doubt. Well, it may be asked, What are you going to do about it? Will you accept the inevitable evils that march in the rear of all public or private charity, or will you sweep all the various agencies, which have relieved such manifold varieties of human want and alleviated to such an incalculable degree human misery, out of existence? Will you care to contemplate what a great city like New York or London would be if to-morrow you closed the doors of all the hospitals, _crèches_, homes of the aged, asylums for the crippled, the blind, the insane, and the like, and turned their inmates one and all into the street?