et, 29, We are all familiar with the difficulty of earning money but few of us have been embarrassed with any difficulty in spending it, Yet there are a considerable number of people in this world wh occupy the same position as Lady Houston, whose late husband lett her a fortune of seven million pounds sterling, She receives shoals of letters every day: from all sorts of people submit various promising schemes for her consideration and ask only for a few hundreds thousands of pounds to enable them to attain affluence, A few optimatsts even send their photographs and enclose a proposal of marriage, The mental equipment of a man who writes a bogging letter and at the same time offers to marry his prospee~ tive benefactress is surely enviable. A certain amount of money is necessary if one is to live at all and a moderate surplus. is an undeniable source of com fort to its fortunate possessor. But " gigantic accumulation of wealth carries with it unsuspectdisadvantages. that are not dificult to envisage even by those of us who are never likely to experience them. Take, for illustration, the ease of a golf enthusiast." He spends no end of time and money and acquires, some people say, a wonderful and. varied vocabulary, ina vain endeavour to defeat an imaginary opponent called bogey, If his good fairy were to wave a wand over him and and endow him with such super= human skill that he could not fail to hole out in one, with every shot from the tee, the pleasure of golf would be gone for him and he would never handle a club again, The joy of the game consist in overcoming hazards and achieving victory; remove this and its piquant gone. So we can well bel that in the race for wealth. when one has passed a certain point in the course and the veal is certain, further effort is une necessary and the zest of acquisition is lost. Then arises the problem of what to do with the money that has been 40 painfully accumulated. It is an incubus, for a man with one million is as well off, from a saying "Never again." If they utilised the help of the village elders in distributing relief, they found that only a percentage of the money given reached the famine-stricken people. took barrow-loads of coppers into the denuded districts, the money shops promptly the rate of exchange and the produce dealers the price of grai so that those made big profits and the really needy got little benefit. When they decided to give grain at a cheap rate jars sent poorly dressed to buy up the stuff which they resold when the distributors had passed on. And it was a thankless task. Those who were helped said "The money is not theirs: it was riven them for us and who knows how much they have kept for themselves." Those who were refused, because they had no need of help, rolled them skinflints who refused to give away that which cost them nothing. So, giving away money, even in needy China, is a disappointing performance, True, nowadays famine relief is only given in exchange for work done in road-making or other useful labour, It is a pity we cannot adopt some such method in Shanghai, for the Charity Organization Society could a tale unfold that would show that it is no less difficult to help the beachcombers and wastrels of our own nationalities than the famine-bitten Chinese.
"Cold charity," the saying woes, "is bitter bread." What ix needed is the personal touch which an institution like the Salvation Army can sive. Something that will not only feed the man's stomach but will also regenerate his mind, and the latter ix the harder task of the two, The best that can be said of the dole, at home. is that it is a necessary evil. The periment of sending some el thousand unemployed miners to reap the Canadian harvest was a ifed success. and further clopment of the idea may Tead to a partial solution of the problem. The poor we shall always have with us and the pro-Wlem of government is not so much to give present help for present need, but so to help those in need that they will ter being helped, be able to help themselves. personal standpoint as, say. Sir David Yule, who left a fortune of £20,000,0000, It ix no more possible to spend the one sam,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.