. It is a
matter with which the American public has absolutely no concern.
Nevertheless all sorts of stories are printed here about his debts to
this person or that. Such stories were circulated when Baron Hirsch
died--so circumstantial that they must have either been based upon
minute knowledge or have been pure fabrications. They were not based
upon knowledge, minute or otherwise, because they were not true." These
stories were rendered more absurd by the fact that a rough calculation
of his receipts during forty years of public life would indicate a sum
of between thirty and forty millions of dollars.

CHARITIES OF THE PRINCE

Of course the expenses of the Heir Apparent were very great even when
those are excepted which the nation paid. His personal gifts to
benevolent institutions, educational concerns, religious interests,
objects of social, moral and physical improvement, hospitals and
infirmaries, asylums, orphanages, commercial and agricultural
organizations, the relief of children and foreigners in distress, deaf
and dumb and blind institutions, memorials and statues, Indian famines,
war funds, calamity funds of various kinds at home, in the Colonies, and
abroad, have been reckoned by an English student of statistics at L3,200
a year, or L128,000 in forty years--$640,000 spent in response to public
appeals alone without reference to the many private charities about
which little was known except that a very large amount of assistance
was given yearly by the Prince and Princess in response to all kinds of
private and authenticated requests. In this general connection Mr.
Gladstone, when Prime Minister, spoke very warmly during the
Parliamentary discussion of 1889 upon the Royal grants of that year. "It
will be admitted," he said in the course of his somewhat famous speech,
"that circumstances have tended to throw upon the Prince of Wales an
amount of public work in connection with institutions as well as with
ceremonials, which was larger than could reasonably have been expected,
and with regard to which every call has been honourably and devotedly
met from a sense of public duty."

Reference has been made in the preceding pages to the infinitely varied
public functions of His Royal Highness and the aid thus given to
charities and benevolent objects. A few instances only were quoted in
which many thousands of pounds were obtained for worthy objects through
his patronage. The fact is that the Heir Apparent ga