Carraway, I will forswear utilitarianism--and you may
remove the golf-balls from the cloisonne vase as soon as you choose."
THE BOOK SALES OF MR. PETERS
Like many another town which frankly confesses itself to be a "city of
the third class," Dumfries Corners is not only well provided but
somewhat overburdened with impecunious institutions of a public and
semi-public nature. The large generosity of persons who never give to,
but are often identified with, churches, hospitals, associations of
philanthropic intent of one kind and another, in Dumfries Corners as
elsewhere, is frequently the cause of embarrassment to persons who do
give without being lavish of the so-called influence of their names.
There are quite a dozen individuals out of the forty thousand souls who
live in that favored town who find it convenient to give away as much as
five hundred dollars annually for the maintenance of milk dispensaries,
hospitals, and other deserving enterprises of similar nature for the
needy. Yet at the close of each fiscal year those who have given to this
extent are invariably confronted by "reports," issued by officials of
the various institutions, frankly confessing failure to make both ends
meet, and everybody wonders why more interest has not been taken.
"Surely, we have loaned our names!" they say. It never occurs to anybody
that one successful charity is better than six failures. It has never
entered into the minds of the managers of these enterprises that a man
disposed to give away five hundred dollars could make his contributions
to the public welfare more efficacious by giving the whole to one
institution instead of dividing it among twenty.
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