In the second generation--what used to be but is no longer the spendthrift generation--the very rich retrench in the matter of large benefactions. The family position is established. None of the members of it has ever known what it is to be hungry or cold without knowing just where to turn for food and warmth. Sympathy, which was the sentiment in the first generation, now becomes pity. Man-to-man is changed into “Bountiful” and his or her “worthy poor.” And we have the pauper-plant in full blast. Each day every rich man or woman who is at all well known receives large numbers of begging letters--from beggars in Maine and in Texas, in Florida and in Washington, in all parts of the Union. They want loans. They want notes or mortgages paid. They want pianos and trousseaus. They want pensions for crippled sons or daughters. Or they want anything from old clothes to several thousand dollars to buy a farm or a store. The apparent effrontery of these requests disappears as the letters are read and the amazing, even pathetic, simplicity of the writers stands out. Curiously enough, some of these requests, preposterous though they are, are granted. A skilfully written letter sent to a certain kind of rich person at just the right moment has been known to produce amazing results. No reader of this book, however, need advise a beggar of his acquaintance to try it. The two cents postage would be far more likely to bring a return if invested in stocks of the mines of the mountains in the moon. There are many of the rich who have every begging letter that is at all reasonable or plausible thoroughly investigated by a secretary--or by some local agent of a corporation in which the recipient happens to be interested. Pity for the “worthy poor” is an extremely potent force in the plutocracy. But it is local pauper-making that has the greatest fascination for the rich man or woman who does not care to go into charity on the Carnegie or Rockefeller or Armour scale, or to take the trouble to organize a bureau that works with precision and without any advertisement of its owner. The “agony stories” cooked up by the newspapers are noted, the slums are ransacked, the parasites on “charity,” both those who honestly deceive themselves and those who deliberately “graft,” are eagerly welcomed and listened to. Thus there are a good many thousands of rich city dwellers with incomes ranging from twenty thousand to several hundred thousands a year, each of whom has his or her circle of “worthy poor,” or gives regularly to those myriad petty enterprises of misdirected or barefacedly fraudulent charity which enlist the activities of so many “workers.”