Puck — June 4, 1879 — page 9: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This Puck cartoon critiques charitable fundraising practices in New York City. The top panel shows poverty and starvation ("No Work—Starvation!"). The bottom panel depicts the "Office of Puck" collecting donations for Purcell's Pence, a charitable fund for the Diocese of New York. The satire's point: rather than addressing root causes of poverty, charitable organizations simply redistribute existing money from one group of poor people to another. The caption explicitly states that collected funds will go to church debts, with only leftovers reaching the actual poor—hence "robbing Peter to pay Paul," an idiom meaning transferring resources from one needy group to benefit another, accomplishing nothing substantive. The cartoon attacks institutional inefficiency and self-serving charity.