Besides the churches and the general relief societies there are numerous agencies for the care and relief of needy families which rest upon a national or special basis. Some of these, as has been explained, date from the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century. Others, how ever, have been founded recently. Their benefits are some times restricted to members and their families, with only such response to appeals from outsiders as would be given by any mutual benefit society not intended for general relief. Others, deriving their financial support from membership fees and the contributions of the charitable, are intended to aid families of a particular nationality or belonging to a specified class. An illustration of the latter is the Armenian Benevolent Association of Boston, formed for the purpose of helping Armenians within ten miles of Boston, securing employment, caring for the sick, and giv ing material aid to the needy. As illustrations of the former may be mentioned the Beneficial Association of the Maryland Line, with headquarters in Baltimore, which, besides being a mutual benefit association of ex-Confeder ate soldiers, also relieves the needs of sick and destitute families of ex-Confederates in Maryland and aids to bury the dead; and the Italian Benevolent Society of New York, which, although stating its general objects to be for the relief of sick and needy Italians, to improve their moral and physical condition, to assist immigrants and to form colonies in different parts of the country, finds it necessary in practice to limit its benefits, to a large extent, to its own members and their friends.
In New York City nearly every nationality is repre sented by a society which, as a rule, aids residents, provides transportation in suitable cases for those who seek to re turn to their own homes, and to some extent aids recent immigrants to find employment. In Boston there are fourteen relief agencies for various nationalities, besides seventy-six mutual benefit societies for special races or nationalities with headquarters in New York. Most not able among agencies of this kind is the Baron de Hirsch Fund, which is amply endowed and does not depend upon current contributions. The object of this fund is to Americanize and assimilate the immigrants by teaching them to become good citizens and to prevent, by all proper means, their congregating in large cities. It furnishes mechanics with tools ; teaches easily acquired trades or the knowledge of the use of tools ; pays entrance fees into trade-unions, loans small sums in exceptional cases to help to self-support, but does not give direct ch6,ritable relief. It does, however, provide transportation to points where it is absolutely known there is a market for the particular kind of laborers to be sent. It establishes day and night schools for children and adults, when the local authorities and private organizations have failed to make such provi sion, wherein are taught the elementary branches of Eng lish, including a knowledge of the Constitution of the United States and the inculcation of improved sanitary habits.
Private charity does not embody itself completely in re lief societies. Organized agencies are likely to absorb attention in a historical survey, since it is possible to trace them. It must never be forgotten, however, that the aid extended to those in distress secretly by private individuals is of vast amount in the aggregate, although the fact that it is left unrecorded leaves it largely outside the field of the student of past or current relief societies.' There is, there can be, no record of the work and gifts of generous stewards of the abundance which has rewarded lives of labor ; of men whom the living recall, the steady stream of whose annual beneficence was a king's ransom, of those whom the living know, whose annual gifts are an ample fortune ; or of the "honorable women," whose lives are full of good deeds and almsgiving. It seems only an injustice to the living and the dead of a community, which has had and still has such men Only a small part of the gifts made for charitable pur poses, munificent in the aggregate, are recorded in any permanent way. Donations for material relief have not been so frequent within the present century as in earlier centuries; partly for the reason that gifts for direct relief, rigidly controlled by the donor's stipulations, were apt to have an injurious effect, and partly because endowments for educational purposes, such as schools and libraries, were found to be far more useful. Aside from donations of large sums by wealthy individuals there remains, how ever, a large field for individual help. Indeed, it is a ques tion whether the unmeasured but certainly large amount of neighborly assistance given in the tenement-houses of the city, precisely as in a New England village or in a frontier settlement, does not rank first of all among the means for the alleviation of distress. The proverbial kindness of the poor to the poor finds ample illustration in the congested quarters of the city, even though physical proximity there counts least in the feeling of responsibility for neighbors. One of the most interesting generalizations made by Charles Booth is that, while all classes in London give largely in charity, the poorest people give the most in proportion to what they have. This is equally true in American communities. What the housekeeper and the fellow-tenants do for the temporary relief of those whose income is cut off by accident, sickness, or misfortune, must be given a large place in any statement of the relief system.