To-day, we may measure the evil effects of "benevolence" of this type,
not merely upon those who have indulged in it, but upon the community at
large. These effects have been reduced to statistics and we cannot, if
we would, escape their significance. Look, for instance (since they are
close at hand, and fairly representative of conditions elsewhere) at
the total annual expenditures of public and private "charities and
corrections" for the State of New York. For the year ending June 30,
1919, the expenditures of public institutions and agencies amounted to
$33, 936,205.88. The expenditures of privately supported and endowed
institutions for the same year, amount to $58,100,530.98. This makes
a total, for public and private charities and corrections of
$92,036,736.86. A conservative estimate of the increase for the
year (1920-1921) brings this figure approximately to one-hundred and
twenty-five millions. These figures take on an eloquent significance if
we compare them to the comparatively small amounts spent upon education,
conservation of health and other constructive efforts. Thus, while the
City of New York spent $7.35 per capita on public education in the year
1918, it spent on public charities no less than $2.66. Add to this last
figure an even larger amount dispensed by private agencies, and we may
derive some definite sense of the heavy burden of dependency, pauperism
and delinquency upon the normal and healthy sections of the community.
Statistics now available also inform us that more than a million dollars
are spent annually to support the public and private institutions in
the state of New York for the segregation of the feeble-minded and
the epileptic. A million and a half is spent for the up-keep of state
prisons, those homes of the "defective delinquent." Insanity, which, we
should remember, is to a great extent hereditary, annually drains from
the state treasury no less than $11,985,695.55, and from private sources
and endowments another twenty millions. When we learn further that the
total number of inmates in public and private institutions in the State
of New York--in alms-houses, reformatories, schools for the blind,
deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in homes for the feeble-minded and
epileptic--amounts practically to less than sixty-five thousand, an
insignificant number compared to the total population, our eyes should
be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of
human waste.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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