Crimes of Charity

'Crimes of Charity' by Konrad Bercovici is a novel based on social science. Excerpt; Every person of intelligence and humanity who has seen the workings of Organised Charity, knows what a deadening and life-sapping thing it is, how unnecessarily cruel, how uncomprehending. Yet it must not be criticized, investigated, or attacked. Like patriotism, charity is respectable, an institution of the rich and great—like the high tariff, the open shop, Wall Street, and Trinity Church. White slavery recruits itself from charity, the industry grows bloated with it, landlords live off it; and it supports an army of officers, investigators, clerks, and collectors, whom it systematically debauches. Its giving is made the excuse for lowering the recipients' standard of living, of depriving them of privacy and independence or subjecting them to the cruelest mental and physical torture, of making them liars, cringers, thieves. The law, the police, the church are the accomplices of charity. And how could it be otherwise, considering those who give, how they give, and the terrible doctrine of «the deserving poor»? There is nothing of Christ the compassionate in the immense business of Organised Charity; its object is to get efficient results—and that means, in practice, to just keep alive vast numbers of servile, broken-spirited people.