CHARITY begins at home, but it is a great mistake to suppose that it should end there. Indeed, in the last analysis, to do for one’s own family is not charity, but a form of selfishness. The truly generous spirit can not resist the call to help the poor and needy, the outcast and degraded.

One’s relation to charity should not be accidental, but should form a part of the plan of one’s life. It is not very creditable to give to a good cause only because one is besieged to do so, or because one is ashamed to say “no.” When the young married couple sit down together for their first discussion of finance, of how much they shall spend for house, for clothes, how much for food, how much for amusement and so on, this question of what shall be done for those poorer than themselves should have a place. No matter how small the sum possible, something should be given to philanthropic work.

The woman of the family is very often, directly or indirectly, the dispenser of the money devoted to charity. She is the one who decides into what channels it shall go. She has the time for investigating the needs of societies and of individuals. The work, too, that accompanies gifts of charity more often falls to her lot than to a man. This is a department of service properly belonging to her. She has natural rights in this section of the world’s work, of which she should be proud.

Charities, broadly, are of two kinds, public and private; and activity in one should not preclude activity in the other. The ideal administration of charity would consist in every person comfortably established, having among his real friends several poor persons or poor families from whom he himself received a broadening knowledge of life, as well as to whom he gave of physical necessities. In the absence of this ideal situation, he must avail himself of the best means open to him. He must take advantage of the splendid organization of modern charities, but he must not forget also to be on the lookout for individual cases of need that are not likely to appear before the board of any philanthropic organization.

We hear it from the pulpit and the platform continually, yet not too often, that organized charitable work is one of the finest achievements of our present civilization. Narrow-minded people sometimes say that our grandmothers got along very well without it, and did as much good as the women of the present day. They got on without it only because they did not have such complex conditions to cope with. It is not possible, no matter how good the intentions of the individuals concerned, that as valuable work can be done without modern methods as with them. In these days, each charity of a city or town attempts to cover one field, and to cover it as thoroughly and from as many different points of view as possible. Wherever possible, the aim of such organizations is to help people to help themselves. The idea is not only to tide the beneficiaries over temporary difficulties, but to aid them in building up character by means of self-respecting effort.

Membership in such organizations brings opportunity for action and knowledge also of the bearings of one’s action. It makes charity something more than a matter of sentimental impulse. The opportunity to do good offered by these societies is not only an opportunity to help the poor, but to help one’s self, and even in other ways than the one generally acknowledged of broadening one’s sympathies and cultivating one’s heart. The gain a woman derives in discipline from working in concert with other women is of inestimable value. This discipline is sometimes accompanied by vexations, as discipline commonly is, but, taken in the right spirit, it is broadening.

Charitable societies are often made up largely of women whose ideas of business are chaotic, whose capacity for speech is not at all equal to their capacity for work. The time spent by such people in idle discussion at business meetings is wearing, but it is not altogether unprofitable. The better trained women must do what they can to improve the situation. When they can not improve it, they must grin and bear it. Even with the drawbacks named, organization pays. The experience of many is a richer thing than the experience of one; and, when it comes to action, concerted action is a more powerful thing than single and individual effort.

One can not help all the causes one would like to help, or belong to the organizations that represent them. One should select that charity which appeals to one most or where one feels one can do the most good, and one should make attendance upon its meetings and the other work of the society a part of one’s regular duties. The sorrows of one’s life often suggest the charity one cares most to aid. Women who have lost little ones feel a drawing of the heart toward the society that helps children. Women who have seen much of pain and suffering in their own families wish to join a society that makes the burden of the sick poor as light as possible. Those who have seen sympathetically the loneliness and bitterness possible to old age, wish to help the aged poor. And the determining personal experience makes the work of charity so much richer and more effectual.

One should not leave the subject of one’s duty to organized philanthropy without a word concerning the work of the social settlement, the greatest philanthropic movement of the day. The idea at the bottom of settlement work, the idea that the rich or the comfortably situated must live with the poor, must know their lives by direct and continuous contact in order to exert any lasting influence for good, is a noble idea in itself and one that is singularly attractive to ardent spirits.

Unfortunately, fashion and the novelty of the life involved in the experiment has made social settlement work attractive to many people for somewhat selfish reasons. Such people should be discouraged from going into it—first, because they hurt the cause. They do not know how to get on with poor people, and often their ill-disguised curiosity amounts to insolence and hurts those whom it is intended the work should benefit. The second reason is that these people who, through excitement and love of novelty, leave their homes for settlement work are often needed at home. It is much the vogue just now for young women just out of college to do a year of social settlement work. If they have what Methodists name “the call,” and have no more urgent and intimate duties behind them, this is very well. But if it means deserting home tasks because they are dull and unexciting, it is well enough to think twice before the mother of the family is left to face all the disagreeable issues of home life. This is one of those cases where charity at home is of more importance than charity abroad. Of social settlement work, seriously and earnestly considered, it is impossible to say too much in commendation.

The philanthropic impulse of a generous heart is not satisfied with giving to organizations or working for them. One must do in other and private ways in order to satisfy one’s heart and conscience. One should help many people through ties of service, of love or of friendship. In time of need, one should remember those people who have lived as domestics in one’s family, or who have been connected in some humble capacity with the business of the head of the house. These persons, if they have been faithful to one’s interests, one helps with a personal enthusiasm that is, of course, lacking in the case of strangers. Faithful or unfaithful, one knows something about them, and can figure out easily what is the wisest as well as the most grateful manner of doing for them.

Then there is the poor relation whom we have always with us and, in the helping of whom, all the tact of which one is possessed is not too much to use. The very fact that he or she, as the case may be, must accept favors from one of the same blood and, therefore, in every sense but the financial, of the same rank in life, makes the graceful bestowal of the gift a matter that is hard to compass. To pass on the gown one has laid aside so that there shall seem to be no condescension in the act; to explain successfully that one sends money at Christmas because one was uncertain what would be the proper gift to buy; in fine, to give with a broad sympathy that, for the minute, gives the donor an insight into the other’s disappointments and vexations—this is what is needed in dealing with the poor relative.

A flavor of even greater grace and delicacy must go into the gift offered by the rich friend to the poor one. It is one of the privileges of the generous rich, not only to feed the starving body but sometimes to feed the starving soul, not only to provide bread and butter but to minister to a starved sense of beauty and of joy. To give pictures and books to those who love them but can not buy, to give a year at college to some nice young fellow whose parents can not do for him, to give pretty trinkets to a pretty young girl who lives in a house where there is no money to spare for such things—these gifts of friendship are one of the greatest privileges of a large income. Though not counted commonly as charity, they come under the head of charity in its biblical significance of love and sympathy.