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Charity Must Work

24 Hours a Day

By Herbert Hoover (Picture)
Secretary of Department of Commerce, U.S.A.

Charity is one labor that cannot sleep. Business Men and bricklayers may cut their working hours to the bone, but the work of Charity never stops.

This is because human suffering has no fixed hours.

The maimed and sick struggle on and on, the starving hunger through the night. Palsy and failing heart know no time-clock. A fatal cough begins and ends at no set moment. The widowed and the orphaned remain bereaved forever.

Charity, as dispensed by the 91 organizations in Federation, works 24 hours to the day. I know enough of the good they do to realize that I am ignorant of even one-hundredth part.

I know of the numbers of hospitals in Federation, where thousands of injured, sick, paralyzed, helpless people not only are cared for, but where able medical and scientific minds are constantly developing new alleviations for suffering and new short cuts to saving lives.

I know of the Federation orphanages; where many poor, lonely little ones are given tender care and molded into the kind of real men and women who make good citizens.

I know of institutions in Federation that bring succor to widowed mothers, to fathers without jobs, to young girls thrown on their own resources in the biggest of our cities, to children born with wordless tongues, to the tubercular, to aged men and women slowly passing down the last pathway.

All this work, and the many other acts of charity of Federation, I know to be good.

Federation is deserving of the aid of every man and woman in New York who is able to help - - even by stretching a point.

Federation must have $4,000,000. now, in order to avoid a deficit in 1925.

I can think of no project more worthy of your assistance. Federation must have the sinews needed for every moment the clock ticks.

Charity must work 24 hours a day. But Charity is a labor of love.

(signed)
(facsimile) Herbert Hoover.