One may incline to
hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one
can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain
that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might
almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others
had not inherited form their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for
instant action."
It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon
the basis of the sanctity of human life. Yet recent events in the world
reveal a curious contradiction in this respect. Human life is held
sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when
humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism,
inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to
facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are enforced to weaken and
starve civilian populations--women and children. This accomplished, the
pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and
the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion.
Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed. We begin to hold human life
sacred again. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly
sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. We indulge in
"drives," in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international
charity.
We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of
international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities,
where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are
forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so
in the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less
populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which
are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of militaristic
statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless propagation and
its consequent over-population.
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