The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in EuropeWashington, Booker T.
History
The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe
Washington, Booker T.
Poor -- Europe; Working class -- Europe
There are in London, for example, 112 institutions for the blind, and
143 institutions which give medical aid in one form or another, for
which the total amount of money expended is about five million seven
hundred thousand dollars annually. There are 214 institutions for
the care of convalescents, for which the annual expenditure amounts
to nearly a million and three quarters; 220 homes for children and
training homes for servants, which are maintained at an annual expense
of over four million dollars annually; 257 institutions for "general
and specific relief," which are supported at an annual cost of nearly
six millions.
There are, besides these, 159 institutions for "penitents," which
receive an income of a million per year; 156 institutions for social
and physical improvement, which include a multitude of the most
varied sorts, as, for example, educational, temperance, and Christian
associations, social settlements, boys' brigades, societies for the
improvement of dwellings, for the improvement of national health, for
suppression of the white slave traffic, etc. These 156 institutions are
maintained at an expense of something over three million and a half
dollars per year.
Finally, there are 47 so-called "spiritual" institutions which are
engaged in propagating in various ways and in various forms a knowledge
of the Bible and a belief in the Christian religion. Although the
spiritual associations represent less than one seventeenth of the total
number of charitable organizations, nearly one fourth of the total
amount of the charities is expended in maintaining them.
According to the best estimate that can be made, the amount of money
thus expended is not less than fifty millions annually. This does not
include, either, the sums collected and expended by the different
churches--the Congregational, Catholic, and Established churches.
In two dioceses of the Church of England--namely, those of London
and Southwark--the sums raised in this way amounted to more than six
hundred thousand dollars.
My attention was especially attracted by the number of shelters and
refuges where homeless men, women, and children are given temporary
aid of one kind and another. In addition to eight shelters maintained
by the Salvation Army in different parts of the city, where homeless
men and women are able to obtain a bed and something to eat, there is
the asylum for the houseless poor, which claims to have given nights'
lodging during the winter months to 80,000; the Free Shelter, in
Ratcliffe Street East, which has given nights' lodging to 125,000; the
Ham Yard Soup Kitchen and Hospice, which in 1908-1909 cared for 343 for
an average of sixteen nights; the Providence Right Refuge and Home,
with reports of nearly 2,100 lodgings, suppers, and breakfasts every
week.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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