New Ideas.
Why charity? asks Henry Ford in his wonderful book, the Bible of the future.
Why should charity have to be forever practised in this world?
And he supplies the answer himself: BECAUSE IT IS EASIER TO GIVE THAN TO MAKE GIVING UNNECESSARY.
The charity that confines itself to giving and does not trouble about making giving unnecessary achieves merely this: THE UPKEEP OF HUMAN MISERY. And well it were if it did nothing more! But it entails another evil – it actually blocks the way to the solution of the problem of human misery. The money, the energy, the intelligence spent in persistently following the wrong road, endowing charity with a semblance of organic form under the denomination of philanthropy, all this simply holds up to our gaze the mirage of a solution but nothing is solved at all. The real matter at issue, seen on the plane where Henry Ford’s extraordinary insight has focussed it, is something differ-
