(3) A further steady damper upon our altruistic zeal is the dread of raising the taxes. Humanitarian movements are well enough, but they cost so much! What is needful is to point out that poverty, unemployment, disease, and the other social ills are also costly; indeed, they cost the public in the long run far more than the expenditure necessary for their abolition or alleviation. It pays in dollars and cents, within a generation or two at least, to make and keep the social organism sound. A wise altruism is not merely a matter of philanthropy; it is also a matter of economy; a means of saving individuals from suffering, but at the same time a means of safeguarding the public treasury. If the community does not pay for the curing of these evils it will have to pay for their results. "It seems to me essentially fallacious to look upon such expenditures as indulgences to be allowed rather sparingly to such communities as are rich enough to afford them. They are literally a husbanding of resources, a safeguard against later unprofitable but compulsory expenditure, a repair in the social organism which, like the repair of a leaky roof, may avert disaster." [Footnote: E. T. Devine, Misery and its Causes, p. 272.] The public must be educated to see the wisdom of investing heavily in long-neglected social repairs and reconstruction, which in the end will far more than pay for itself in the lowering of expenses for police, courts, prisons, hospitals, asylums, and almshouses, in the lowered death-rate, immunity from costly disease, and increased working capacity of the people.