thropic enterprise. Proof on this point would be overwhelming were we to take the necessary space to present it. One has only to go through the annual reports of the New York State Board of Charities and read the exposures that have repeatedly been made of the state of affairs on the islands of the East River and in the county almshouses of the State to satisfy himself that were the whole burden of supporting the pauper population of this Commonwealth, and especially of this city, thrown upon the public, private enterprise withdrawing from the competition, the appropriations mentioned by Mr. Coler would sink into ridiculous insignificance by comparison. The appropriation of public money to private institutions has become a scandalous abuse, but we shall never understand its strength until we frankly face the fact that the public has been experimenting with it, hoping thus to find a way of escape from the greater abuses that attend the administration of public relief by public agencies except when they are incessantly watched and held up to the broadest light of publicity by the disinterested efforts of private citizens.
The omission of this side of the matter from Mr. Color's discussion may perhaps be regarded as a mere failure to deal with the whole of a very large and difficult problem. But it is more than a mere omission; it is, I think, a positive error, and a serious one, into which the comptroller falls when he lays as much stress as he does upon the expenditure, for salaries and wages, of a large proportion of the sums appropriated by the city for private institutions. The real question here, as all sound experience has repeatedly demonstrated, is not whether the expenditure is for salaries in general rather than for relief. This Mr. Coler practically admits when he says that a great deal of money spent for relief is worse than wasted, because it fosters pauperism instead of repressing it, and when, at the close of his article, he says that he found it necessary to create in his department a bureau to investigate the character of institutions asking aid. This is a frank confession that the expenditure of money for salaries or for wages may be wiser than its expenditure in relief, provided the salaries or wages are earned in actual investigation, which results in exposing fraud and preventing expenditures on improper applicants. This is the very kernel of the whole matter, whether it is a private or a public administration of charity that we are considering. The use of money, public or private, for the payment of salaries that are mere sinecures is dishonesty pure and simple, and neither the comptroller nor any of those private organizations that make it their business to watch and criticise administration can have a more imperative duty than that of putting an end to such corruption. But, on the other hand, there could be
