THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1909. A MAKER OF MODERN PHILANTHROPY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14223, 20 November 1909, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1909. A MAKER OF MODERN PHILANTHROPY.

The fountain-head of many of our most approved methods of philanthropy comes very vividly to light in the recently published " Letters and Journals of Samuel ,' Gridley Howe," edited by his daughter, Laura E. Richards. A career of rare brilliancy, beneficence, and originality is unfolded to us, and at point after point in this career we can discern the first beginnings of ways of dealing with social problems which to us are self-evident, but which in Dr. Howe's time demanded the insight of the seer, the courage of the soldier, and the sagacity and 'pertinacity of the statesman, for their recognition. The reader of this book cannot lay it down without being convinced that he has beeu in touch with the most picturesque and original personality in- the history of social reform. ■ Picturesque : his appearance was that of an ideal knight, and his career that of a knight of the red-cross shield, a happy warrior who went everywhere redressing human wrong, a singularly felicitious blend of Sir Launcelot and the Good Samaritan. Original : it is to him we owe the initiation of such features of our twentieth century charity as labour-tests, education to self-help, labour colonies- for the unemployed, the family system instead of the institutional system, the specialised treatment of juvenile offenders, the reformatory plan in prison discipline, the, development of 'the feeble-minded, the education "of the blind, and the miracle of drawing out the intelligence of the blind deaf-mute. , Truly an astonishing record. It is claimed that hardly one of Dr. Howe's theories has now failed to be acted upon in some practical way; and yet nearly every one of them was hotly disputed by the official representatives of charity and education with whom Dr. Howe had to deal.

Dr. Howe's philanthropic crusade began in 1824, when he was 23 years old. He had just taken his medical degree, and, instead of settling down to the sober life of Boston, he caused consternation among his friends, by sailing, like a medieval knight, for the East, captivated by the romance of Greece, then struggling for her independence. He. offered himself as an -unpaid surgeon to "the Greek army, and caring not what* he ate or what he "wore or how or where he slept, he identified' himself with the guerilla warfare*; shar^

ing all dangers, ministering to the wounded, encouraging the defeated, and winning all hearts as no other volunteer in the ranks. Returning to the United States in 1827, he collected 60,000 dollars' for destitute Greeks.- . The distribution of this amount, which he undertook personally, brought him face to face with the problem, now : so familiar, of scientific relief, and the solution which he found gives him , his first claim to distinction as a maker of modern philanthropy. Anxious .to relieve without pauperising, he selected an island, that of iEgina, which seemed to him specially necessitous, and there undertook muchneeded harbour works. At the end of five months he was able to report that he had supported seven hundred poor during the most rigorous season of the year, and enriched the island of JSgina with a beautiful, commodious, and permanent quay. Near Corinth he, at the same time, established a colony of the unemployed, supplying seed, cattle, and rations for twenty-six families, on the understanding that half the harvest was to be for themselves and half for the maintenance of the colony, which he named Washingtonia. Thus,. at this early stage in his career, he had anticipated three characteristic features of modern scientific philanthropy—labour-tests, the encouragement of self-help, and labour settlements.

The scene of this romantic life is henceforth America, with occasional visits to Greece and.another parts of Europe. Dr. Howe . beco'mes director of the New England Asylum for the Blind. While learning all he can of such institutions in England and France, he is unable to resist the desire to carry, aid from lis own country and from France , to ;he Polish refugees encamped on the aanks of the Vistula, with the result that he is thrown by the Prussion authorities into prison. Years afterwards, when awarded a gold medal by the King of Prussia for lis distinction as a teacher of the blind, he weighs the medal and finds that its value in money is the ;xact equivalent of the sum he had seen forced to pay for his prison soard and lodgings in 1832! To the olind he now devotes himself, improving upon the best methods elsewhere in vogue, inventing new types [or reading and new forms for geography and arithmetic, appealing to bhe public, and addressing legislatures all over the United States. A.s with the blind, so with the : im- j becile ; he took numbers of the sufferers into his own quarters and j avished upon them all the devotion :>f a father. Into the anti-slavery ;rusade he threw himself with ardour, and yet ~ with that. singular I freedom from, extravagance ? which i distinguished him and led one of the nost judicious critics of his time to : declare that he was the one active reforming philanthropist he had ever Snown.who was at the same time a 'air-minded and tolerant man. With the impetuosity and derring do and passion for the romantic of the Knight-errant, with all the impelling enthusiasm of the reformer, his ! was also the sanity and sweet reasonableness of the philisopher. Too old 4 to fight in the Civil War, he accepted an appointment on the Sanitary Commission, which with mflagging devotion collected money : and supplies' for the men of - the North. At the age of sixty-five he sailed for the third time for Greece, baking 37,000 dollars for the oppressed Cretans ; at seventy, he went is. Commissioner to \San Domingo, ind anticipated the result of the relent war with Spain by. reporting

favourably on its annexation. ' For the last eleven years of his life he was Chairman of the Massachusetts

Board of State Charities. And, true till death, the final call came to him one day in January, 1876, as he was walking to his beloved school.

This romance of chivalric charity would be singularly inspiring as a creation: of the imagination, and that it is literal 'fact means something of a revelation as to the possibilities of approximation between the ideal and the actual. % And we are glad to know, and to cherish ? the know-

ledge, that so much of our most ad-

vanced philanthropy is traceable :to a single master mind and heart, a knight of the modern world, whose battlefield was the realm of human woe, and the castle of his besiegement that which held the souls of men immured in the dungeons of darkness and silence and chaos. To all time the miracle must be told how, echoing the primal Voice, he said, "Let there be light," and there was light. ; ;