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Newspaper Page Text
CHEER UP, FOLKS! IN FIFTY YEARS UNITED CHARITIES MAY GET RESULTS BY JANE WHITAKER "There's no use trying to help the individual; he may not be worth helping, he may be getting just what he deserves. Our aim is to collect statistics on what causes poverty and perhaps in twenty-five or fifty years from now we may know enough about the situation to be able to cope with it. But at present we are collecting statistics." That statement was made by Ernest Bicknell, then superintendent of the Bureau of Charities, which later became the United Charities. Bicknell is now national superintendent of the Red Cross Society. It was made to a nurse who had appealed to Bicknell to assist one of the most pitiful cases that had ever been brought to her attention. The nurse is not temperamental, she is not sentimental; she -is a very well balanced woman whose long experience has taught her to take a very practical view of things. , "But really that case was awful," she said to me. "In a round about way we had received word that a man was dying of tuberculosis. I went there and had quite a little trouble finding him, but finally, located him in a room in the rear of a basement. It was in the winter, the thermometer was below zero; he. was lying on a mattress ana ne naa no covering i but the rags he wore. There was no heat in the place. He was in the last stages of tuberculosis. "Accustomed as I have been to suf fering, there was something terrible in the man's condition, in his isola tion, in the abject misery that made one almost feel as if God had forgot ten him, too; "I called up my superior and she advised that I get in touch with the United Charities. "I got Bicknell on the 'phone and I told him the story as it had impress ed me. " 'Oh, you mustn't be so sentimen tal, he said. "You cannot expect to help the individual,' and then he made the speech of which I have told you, adding: " 'How do you know but that the man deserves just what he has got? He may have been a drunkard or a loafer that wouldn't work. That's what we have got to find out what causes poverty, before we can do anything with it. That's why we are collecting statistics now. Some day we can lay our finger on the cause and then remove it, but we can't do It now.' "And the Bureau of Charities did not lend me any assistance, but my superior got the man in a Home for1 Incurables." Bicknell's attitude seems to have been a prophecy of the future work of the United Charities It is a col lector of statistics on ppverty. It is an amateur scientist making micro scopic studies of what causes pover ty, and how much it hurts, and how long the patient Is able to endure and what the sufferer will do when he reaches the limit of endurance. On one of their records that I read was the statement that a woman, mother of three children and expect ant mother of a fourth, had come to the office of the U. C. for assistance almost a week after she had been given a dollar to support herself and family, and that "when -we gave her another 50 cents, she became hyster ical with gratitude." And yet, why should the United Charities bother collecting statistics on why poverty exists? It has been with us since Christ spoke so many centuries ago: "The poor ye have always with you." And if the United Charities wants rtittfm tun it rriMtfrthnirnnriiftrti MrtBttafcajftii i i' 'Ti-ff " rfan ifiiht I'Miir