Of all the charities I know, I think that the sanest, the most far-sighted, and the most surely pregnant with good is the Sage Foundation. Perhaps my opinion is little more than conceit. I myself have given so much time and effort to studying the causes of the growth of poverty in this country that perhaps an institution founded with a tremendous fund of money behind it to carry on an exhaustive and scientific research into the causes of poverty strikes me as the most intelligent of all the charities I have ever seen, merely because it fits in with my own personal ideas, and is the very charity I myself would have founded had I had the disposition toward charity and the means to put it into effect. I cannot speak with authority of the actual work that the Sage Foundation is doing; but I fancy, if one could to-day take an inventory of actual results accomplished, he would find that the foundation has barely been begun, and that these artisans of the millennium have not yet even drawn tentative plans for the superstructure. I have, however, read with extreme interest a report made by the trustees as the result of an investigation of the living conditions in families in New York City, and I do not hesitate to say that, in the compilation of that report alone, the Sage Foundation has accomplished a work of great practical utility. People of my class, when they read a book, seldom write to the author and give him their impressions. In all human probability the compilers of this report do not know whether any one in the wealthy class of New York Society has read the book. I can assure them that it has been excellently read. One night, in a company of about a dozen, I mentioned it. All but two in the party had read extracts from it in the newspapers, two had read it in full for information, and one raised a laugh by saying that his secretary had tried in vain to buy it at four book stores. This work, in my opinion, will bear a tremendous crop of fruit. We need facts, and we need them very badly. Frankly, we are afraid of such estimates as those contained in Mr. Robert Hunter’s “Poverty,” full as it is of vague, loose, and inaccurate statements, academic estimates in round millions, and glittering generalities of all sorts. We cannot find knowledge in the Socialist libraries, for we distrust the Socialist propaganda intensely. We must have sane, clear, dispassionate analysis of the situation, or we shall stumble blindly on as we are stumbling to-day, wasting our millions on foolish charities, debauching honest men and women by unnecessary gifts, pandering to laziness, and actually increasing in this land of industry the army of dependent paupers. I hope that the time will come when the Sage Foundation will be, as it were, a guiding light upon the sea of charity.