There are nine million societies, more or less, organized to improve and to ameliorate.

 

There are preachers, missionaries¹, evangelists, reformers, exhorters, viewers-with-pride, and pointers-with-alarm without number wrestling with sinners.

 

All forms of industry are booming these days in the U. S. A., but the uplift business is still several laps ahead.

 

It seems ungracious to say a word to any enthusiastic person who is engaged in so laudable an enterprise as that of rescuing the perishing, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick.

 

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And yet, when you take time to think right through to the bottom of things, you must come to the conclusion that there is but one real, radical² and effective way to help your fellow-men, and that is the way called justice.

 

If I want to redeem³ the world I can come nearer my object, and do less harm, by being just toward myself and just toward everybody else, than by “doing good” to people.

 

The only untainted charity is justice.

 

Often our ostensible⁴ charities serve but to obscure and palliate great evils.

 

Conventional charity drops pennies in the beggar’s cup, carries bread to the starving, distributes clothing to the naked. Real charity, which is justice, sets about removing the conditions that make beggary, starvation, and nakedness.

 

Conventional charity plays Lady Bountiful; 140 justice tries to establish such laws as shall give employment to all, so that they need no bounty⁵.

 

Charity makes the Old Man of the Sea feed sugar-plums to the poor devil he is riding and choking; justice would make him get off his victim’s back.

 

Conventional charity piously⁶ accepts things as they are, and helps the unfortunate; justice goes to the legislature and changes things.

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