I hesitate to undertake any extensive review of the great charities and reforms that have sprung out of this new impulse that has moved the rich to study the poor. I hesitate not because there is dearth of material, but because of my own knowledge. I know that the facts of record are but a very small part of all the facts in the case. The tremendous benefactions of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Mrs. Sage, do not begin to measure the organized and unorganized charities that have been inaugurated by the wealthy within the past ten years. Personally, I do not think very much about the forms of charity that are to-day most prevalent amongst the wealthy. Millions of dollars every year are poured indiscriminately into all sorts of hoppers here in New York, in the vain hope that they will help to bring about better conditions. Money-charity, if I may call it so, seems to me a beautiful thing if it is really done in a spirit of helpfulness--but, alas, how vain it is! I do not know but that, in the case of more than half the recipients of charity of this indiscriminate sort, it does more harm than good. This I do know, that, according to the best estimates obtainable, from eighteen per cent. to twenty-five per cent. of the people of New York State accept charity every year. This is a matter of record. How many more are the recipients of unrecorded charity I do not know, but I should not be surprised if forty per cent. of the population of the greatest state of the Union are the beneficiaries of charity, of one sort and another, in such a year as 1908, for instance. Professor Bushnell, in an estimate made some years ago, estimated that nearly two hundred million dollars a year was spent upon the maintenance of abnormal dependents in the United States. Think, then, of the amount of money that must be lavished upon the thousand and one indiscriminate charities extended to people who cannot be classed as dependents at all. Charity, beautiful as it is in many instances, is a hopeless answer to the questions of the day. The wonderful growth of it in the past three or four years in the social world to which I belong is hopeful, not because of the actual good it has accomplished or can accomplish, but simply because it is another index of the times, another indubitable sign that the wealthy men and women of Society are really throwing their hearts and minds into the mighty problem of adjusting the relationship between the classes which are so rapidly drifting apart.