What is the first thing in question? To collect thirty million francs
annually for the payment of the clergy. The thirty millions are
furnished: poor and rich, all give eagerly, and without compulsion. The
next thing in question is to provide for the construction of new
churches; now, it is necessary to finish not less than three of these
daily, for the clearing of the forests advances with rapid strides, and
a thousand churches, at least, are built every year. The majority of
these churches are doubtless composed of beams laid one upon another,
then painted white, or left of the natural color, and surmounted by a
bell; they are simple and inexpensive, and, in the infant villages, the
streets of which are still blocked up by trees left standing, the place,
serving at once for a church and a school, where the people gather round
an itinerant preacher, is not decorated with much sumptuousness; yet
these new edifices demand annually from twelve to fifteen millions.

Next come the religious societies. In the West, preachers are needed,
hardy laborers, who live in privations, traversing vast solitudes on
horseback, and journeying continually, without repose, until their
strength is exhausted. Eight hundred missionaries or agents are required
for the American Board of Missions, for the Presbyterians, the Baptists,
and all the other churches. Now, they cannot send them to the four
quarters of the globe without providing for their wants. The Bible
Society, which prints three hundred thousand Bibles annually, the
Religious Tract Society, which publishes every year five millions of
tracts, and which, in New York alone, employs a thousand visitors or
distributors; the various works, in a word, expend from nine to ten
million francs.

Such, then, is the budget of voluntary charity in the United States.[A]
It amounts to fifty or sixty million francs, without counting the very