ABSTRACT
Proud of their record of private and voluntary giving at home and abroad, Americans often overlooked their indebtedness to the charity of the Old World. This debt has been both direct and indi rect. Indirectly, Americans, in giving, responded to transmitted re ligious and humanitarian precepts. They adopted Europe’s charitable trust and the common law and made use of the voluntarily supported permanent agency for the advancement of religion and knowledge, a model being the eighteenth-century British Society for the Propa gation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The direct philanthropic debt of America includes private contributions from Europeans when catastrophes struck not only the relatively feeble colonies but well established communities in the nineteenth century and even in the early twentieth century. Far more important than such contribu tions in times of flood, fire, earthquake, and epidemic have been the private gifts from the Old World for founding and supporting schools, colleges, and learned societies in America. This story, which has been told only in fragments, needs to be kept in mind in the counterpart record of American giving to other peoples.
