Before I close this talk about methods of raising money for charities, I wish to speak of one very common method which I have not yet mentioned. It is exploited with considerable frequency in every community in the Christian world. A public meeting is called, and orators appointed to move the audience to tearsⒶtextual note and charity. The scheme is good, and when it is well managed the results are about all that could be desired. But oftener than otherwise, I think, mismanagement is the rule. Commonly, instead of enlisting one strong speaker whose whole heart is in his work, and then promptly shutting off his oratory the moment that he has worked up the house to the highest attainable point of enthusiasm for the cause, three or four—or half a dozen—minor speakers are added to the list, and they weary the house; they exasperate it; and the results for the charity are deplorable.

I am now once more reasoning from experience, not hearsay—an experience which makes me unhappy now, and has made me unhappy every time it has risen upon my memory in the long stretch of thirty years since it burnt for itself a habitation there. It is an incident of the Hartford days. A Mr. Hawley was the city missionary—a man with a big generous heart, a charitable heart; a man whose pity went spontaneously out to all that suffer, and who labored in behalf of the poor, the forsaken, the forlorn, and the helpless, with an eager andⒶtextual note tireless zeal not matchable among men, I think, except where the object is the acquiring of somebody else’s money upon gratifyingly hard and sordid terms. He was not a clergyman, nor an officer in any church; he was merely a plain, ordinary Christian; but he was so beloved—not to say worshiped—by all ranks and conditions of his fellow-citizens that he was called “Father”Ⓐtextual note by common consent. It was a title of affection, and also of esteem and admiration; and his character and conduct conferred a new grace and dignity upon that appellation.Ⓐtextual note

Father Hawley collected money, clothing, fuel, food, and other necessaries of lifeⒶtextual note for the people, and personally attended to the distribution of these things among the Hartford poor—not among the professional paupers; he left those to the city government, and to the regular charity organizations, and confined his efforts to the seeking out in garrets and cellars of worthy and honest poor families and individuals who had [begin page 282] fallen into poverty through stress of circumstances but endured their miseries in silence and concealment, and would not beg. All the year long, day and night, Father Hawley prosecuted his still-hunt after the sick and hungry of this class, and once annually he summoned the city and gave an account of his stewardship.

That was always a great night in Hartford, a memorable night. There was no house that could hold the people, but as many got in as could find sitting room or standing-space,Ⓐtextual note for when Hawley set out to tell of the pitiful things he had seen in the cellars and the garrets there was no eloquence like to his; not even the coldest heart in the house could listen unmoved.

I was present at one of these annual assemblagesⒺexplanatory note, and although it was a matter of thirty years ago, I find no difficulty in remembering it. The house was packed to suffocation. When Hawley cameⒶtextual note forward upon the platform, the house rose, with one impulse, and greeted him with a storm of welcome which continued during a minute or more. Then he began his report—not with a flourish, not with wordy embroideries and decorations, but quietly, without gestures,Ⓐtextual note and in the simplest words. He stood there like another Wendell PhillipsⒺexplanatory note—indeed, he reminded me of Wendell Phillips; and it is not too high praise to say, thatⒶtextual note in his way, and on his own specialty,Ⓐtextual note he was that master’s peer. Wendell Phillips used to stand motionless, and seemingly emotionless, and deliver gentle and simple sentences that blighted and blasted, and which drove his hearers to almost uncontrollable fury. And in the same way, Father Hawley, standing solitary,Ⓐtextual note and still, and gestureless, told in the simplest language tales of sorrow, and suffering, and grief, and unearned misery, which wrung the hearts of his house and made their tears flow like rain.

At the end of twenty minutes, that packed audience was beside itself; it was beside itself in the sense that it was lifted above itself, exalted to lofty and generous and hitherto unknown altitudes of feeling; and every individual there was eager and anxious and aching to put his hand in his pocket and contribute every penny he had to the cause for which Father Hawley was pleading. I was like the rest. I had four hundred dollars in my pocket, in bills. I wanted somebody to come and get it; and I wished I had any rag of paper that I could write a check upon. That man had so stirred my compassion for his poor that my emotions had overmastered me, and I was in a sense insane. If they had passed the plate at that supreme moment, that vast audience would have gone forth from that place beggars, paupers, proper subjects for Father Hawley’s own benevolent ministrations.

But no—always when there is a chance for an ass to work his gift, that ass is always there. He was there on that night to help mismanage the enterprise and defeat it. Father Hawley may have talked a half hour, in making his report,Ⓐtextual note but I think it was not so much. When he sat down the house was wild to impoverish itself for the cause. But four speakers followed him, and then the fatigue began; also the cooling process—that is, the pocket-books began to cool, but not the hides ofⒶtextual note their owners—far from it! By this time every man was sweltering; and it will never be known how hot the place really was, because there was only one thermometer, and it vomitedⒶtextual note its quicksilver out at the top and left no record of what it had scored.Ⓐtextual note

The first speaker abolished my desire to get a piece of paper and do a check; the second [begin page 283] one reduced my proposed four-hundred-dollarⒶtextual note contribution to two hundred; the third and fourth reduced it to nothing;Ⓐtextual note and at last, when the plate did get to me I put in a button and took out ten cents.

This experience, taken along with others of a similar sort, has convinced me that when a public call for a benevolence is resorted to, the very first thing to be considered and cared for is the management of it. A professional manager ought to be engaged, and paid for his services.Ⓐtextual note Under amateur management, mismanagementⒶtextual note is almost always the rule, I believe;Ⓐtextual note with the result, as I think, that the right moment for passing the plate is missed,Ⓐtextual note and, by consequence, dimes collected where dollars could have been secured if the orators had been gagged at the time that they ought to have received that attention. The managementⒶtextual note ought always to provide gags, and they ought always to be applied when the proper time arrives.