Charity Begins at Home.
By H. R.
A FEW years ago I was in San Francisco, and had been for several years there an active member of a private Society to Help the Poor, meeting once a week; those members who could afford to pay twenty-five cents per week, dues, did so; the workers paying fifty cents per month. Our work was very laborious. First, to look up the needy families, then to trace up all their possible claims upon charity, which would be so conflicting at times, as to put us on detective duty to find the truth. Abuse we were prepared to take in any form. We supplied in groceries—tea, coffee, rice, salt, sugar, beans, codfish, flour, smoked salmon, oatmeal, besides wood and coal, a physician in case of sickness, and cash if required. It is scarce necessary to add, I became discouraged often at the attempts to assist the families of drunkards, miserable curses to themselves and families. The poor children's clothing which we gave this week, were next week traded off at the saloon or corner grocery for whisky or beer. A woman would ask for clothing—we held sewing bees—it would be given her, and next week she would send word that she was sick in bed and starving, and sure enough she would be in bed, because she had no clothes to wear; they had followed others to the dram-shop, and she was in a fair way of starving; her children ran the streets shoeless and almost naked, to be fed by the neighbors, and her husband was in jail for a noisy drunk. There was nothing we could do for these poor children, as they were not orphans, and the “P. O. C. to Children's Society” was not yet in existence. To-day those children are our citizens of a “Noble Republic,” but too much debauched, morally and mentally, to be anything less than a curse to society, and a dangerous element in politics. —H. R., in State Prohibitionist.