American Philanthropy and the National Character

Abstract

IN 1875 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, better known for his championship of the slave and of women's rights than for linguistic scholarship, reported that the term philanthropy had appeared for the first time as an English word in The Guide to Tongues, published in 1628. The word was simply Philanthropie; Humanitie; a loving of man. Dryden, in apologizing for his use of the word philanthropy, declared that it had been introduced into English because there was no indigenous word to connote precisely the meaning of the Greek original. Colonial scholars who read in the original such writers as Isocrates, Xenophon, Epictetus, Plutarch and Polybius, knew the word in its Greek form, but the word philanthropy was not generally in English until the time of Addison.' The term found some favor among disciples of the Enlightenment, but it came into common use only in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It meant the love of man, charity, benevolence, humanitarianism, social reform. To cite an example from the hundreds at hand, Theodore Parker spoke of John Augustus as a philanthropist. This illegitimate, eccentric Lexington shoemaker had, Parker declared, earned the title by giving help to the helpless and love to the unlovely; more concretely, by bailing thousands out of jail, keeping hundreds from crime and redeeming countless fallen women.2 In the minds of some of Theodore Parker's