the image of his Master. I need not say, ladies and gentlemen, I allude to the heroic life of St. Vincent de Paul. May such disinterested charity be an inspiration for all time!

I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for listening so kindly to these poor words of mine, and I trust that your success in dealing with the difficult problems of charity and correction may be commensurate with your good will, and with the noble cause in which you are enrolled.

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

By ROBERT W. DE FOREST.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

This is a Conference not only of charities but of correction, and because it is a Conference of correction as well as of charity the laws of this Conference have prescribed, as a correctional feature, the punishment of a President's address. The subject of what I shall briefly say is "Justice, not Charity."

These are the words on the lips of some who ask us almost defiantly for aid. This is the thought, less articulately expressed, in the sullen look of others who ask with less insistence. Such words and looks are the open expression of a discontent that challenges the rightfulness of the present social system, and challenges in particular the present division of what are sometimes termed "the good things of life."

If the reasoning which underlies this discontent be pursued to its logical conclusion, it would seem to call for some redistribution on the principle that equality is justice. Nor is this line of thought confined to those who have little or nothing. There are men who hold university degrees and some property besides who are ready to proclaim the principle if not to practice it.

Justice, not charity. These words raise the eternal question of social obligation, a question which presents itself anew to each generation and even to the same generation under changing cir

cumstances. To answer that the present social conditions are the best possible because they have come into existence, or even because they were, in fact, the best possible in the past, is to deny the progress of civilization, to deny that process of evolution through which the human race has been passing for centuries before history began, and which is now proceeding with appalling velocity, compared to which its past progression was as the creeping of a snail to the running of a race horse. Justice to-day might have been charity yesterday. Charity to-day may be justice to-morrow.

Does the justice of to-day call for any redistribution of property? May the man who claims that the world owes him a living rightfully call on us to pay the debt out of what we have laid by ourselves or what our ancestors have accumulated before us?

Searching back into my childish memories, I recall my inability to reconcile that attribute of God which my catechism called justice with the denunciatory words of the second commandment: Visiting the iniquities of the father upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me.”

Reading these words as a man, I recognize in them an expression of the law of heredity which, irrevocable and irresistible, links generation to generation. Idleness, disease and crime in the parent are visited upon the third and fourth generation of his descendants, however little those descendants may have deserved them from my childish sense of justice. Industry, health and virtue are likewise visited, though happily in another way, upon the third and fourth generation, however little they may have deserved them from the same point of view.

I remember a friend once remarking, in the same line of thought, that avarice was a very pardonable vice in one's ancestors. Just or unjust, from the standpoint of child or man, the law of heredity, the linking of successive generations to each other, is the law of nature. Just or unjust we cannot change it, nor can we change its consequences. Men are not created equal,

the Declaration of Independence to the contrary notwithstanding. The law of succession, call it heredity if you will, is a law of inequality, and it is a law as unchangeable as the law of gravitation. We may think it just that Newton's apple should have fallen up into space instead of down to the ground. We may think that the poverty or disease to which some are doomed by no apparent fault of their own, and the riches or health with which others are blessed with no apparent merit of their own, are inconsistent with divine justice, but such inequalities are part of the eternal decrees of God. For all practical purposes of life, that which is and cannot be changed must be accepted as just. Inequality of condition, therefore, is no injustice.

What then? Must our twentieth century justice, because existing conditions are inevitable, accept them as permanent conditions and crystallize them into castes from which succeeding generations cannot escape, castes such as Indian civilizations, and civilizations older than Indian civilizations have created, and such as are even now recognized in some degree in modern Europe? Not so. Even the Biblical curse or blessing did not go beyond the third or fourth generation, and if God were to make a new revelation of the law, in view of all He has been doing with the world since Moses came down from the Mount, He might in justice shorten the sentence. Even the Mosaic law had its year of jubilee. Twentieth century justice certainly requires that so far as the law of heredity will permit, every man should have equal opportunity of recurring to what we may believe to have been original conditions of equality, and twentieth century justice also requires that, having that opportunity open, every man should reap the consequences of embracing it or not, consequences all the more momentous because, by God's rule of justice, they fall not only upon him, but upon his children and his children's children.

I recall walking home from church with one of my sons, who was thought too young to have paid attention to the sermon. Its

subject had been the responsibility of parents for their children. He said to me, 66 Father, I do not believe that sermon. You are not responsible for me. I am responsible for myself. Only I want a chance." Justice requires that every one should have a chance, and justice equally requires that every one having that chance should be held responsible for his use of it. If a man fail to use his chance, charity may step in, but not justice. He may fail not for any lack of good-will or effort on his part, but because of what his ancestors did or did not do. It is nevertheless charity, not justice, that relieves him.

Thus far in the abstract. Now in the concrete. To what practical conclusions, to what action on our part, does such reasoning lead? I once attended a country funeral. An old farmer, speaking of the deceased, said: "He was a good man; he always paid his debts." He did not say he was good because he was charitable; he was good because he paid his debts. What are our debts? What do citizens of the Empire State of our great Republic, we who, whether justly or unjustly, have most of us succeeded to the blessing, not the curse, of generations gone beforewhat do we owe by way of justice to our fellow-men who, whether justly or unjustly, are less fortunate? Leave charity out for the moment; duty it may be, but it is a lesser duty. The paramount duty is justice. In a proper will, the first clause directs the payment of the testator's just debts; legacies come afterward. And if he omits to write in this first clause, the law inserts it for him. I am not at all sure that what the Greeks meant by their word "caritas," which we have translated "charity "-"love of mankind," is not best exercised by practicing simple justice; by giving to every one an opportunity and letting every one abide by the consequences of taking advantage of that opportunity or not.

"The wages of sin is death." That may seem grim gospel, but it is true gospel, and if our charity interferes to remit the

penalty in one case, many may be tempted into sin who would never otherwise have committed it. If in our love for mankind. we by our aid prevent one man from suffering the natural consequences of idleness, we may discourage several in what might otherwise have been a successful effort to maintain their selfdependence. Such charity is not true charity. Simple justice were better.

But what are our social debts? What particular acts of justice do we owe our neighbors? There are many, but there is but one of which I intend to speak to-night. During the past year my attention has been especially directed to the subject of housing the working classes, that subject which in New York and some other cities deals chiefly with tenement-houses. It has been my duty and privilege to have been a member of the recent New York Tenement-House Commission, appointed by that eminent citizen of New York who is now the President of the United States, and a Commission whose recommendations have been enacted into law in great measure by the cordial support of that other eminent citizen who is now the honored Governor of our State. I have taken part with my fellow-members of this Commission in a somewhat careful study of the housing conditions of the working classes in cities, at home and abroad, but particularly in cities of this State, and in the course of this study I have reached certain strong convictions as to what justice, simple justice, to the working classes demands. Nor do these questions simply concern the greater cities of New York and Buffalo, to which thus far all State legislation has been directed. They equally concern many of the smaller cities in the State, not because the evils which exist in New York as yet exist in them, but because by timely action these evils can be prevented, thus not only benefiting the working classes who are to be housed, but relieving the classes who are to house them from building now that which may have to be changed later at some burden of expense. For