the world of private banking

PRIVAtE BANKERS AND PHILANtHROpy 261
– cannot be measured, but cannot have been insignificant. Philanthropic activity
was an important facet of the impact of financiers upon the world at large. To give
some quantitative estimation of the relative importance of the sums transferred: in
1890 the total cost of public expenditure on Poor Law relief in England and Wales
(including capital and salary costs) was £8,434,000; in 1900 it was £11,588,000. 40
Equally hard to measure, but perhaps also significant, was the impact upon the
business and social opportunities of the donors. If we are fully to understand
the role of financiers in the international culture of the later nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, philanthropy is a dimension which cannot be ignored and
which deserves more detailed examination.
40
K. Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty (London, 1981), p. 171.