ABSTRACT
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, philanthropy meant not financial support for educational, charitable, and cultural institutions but advocacy of humanitarian causes such as improvement in prison conditions; abstinence or temperance in use of alcohol; abolition of slavery, flogging, and capital punishment; and recognition of the rights of labor, women, and nonwhite people. Evangelical Protestants who supported the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, temperance, and missionary activities to Christianize Africa and Asia and to put the love of Jesus and the fear of God into the hearts of the lower classes at home, were the butt of derision such as Dickens's attack on "telescopic philanthropy and rapacious benevolence." Slavery, the issue in reform in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, was a subject on which someone like James Russell Lowell, normally conservative in his opinions, could take a radical stance.
