Democracy and Social Ethics | Page 5

act in circles of habit, based upon
convictions which we no longer hold. Thus our estimate of the effect of
environment and social conditions has doubtless shifted faster than our
methods of administrating charity have changed. Formerly when it was
believed that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness, and that
the prosperous man was the righteous man, charity was administered
harshly with a good conscience; for the charitable agent really blamed
the individual for his poverty, and the very fact of his own superior
prosperity gave him a certain consciousness of superior morality. We
have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have
ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect;
while it is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its
possession is by no means assumed to imply the possession of the
highest moral qualities. We have learned to judge men by their social
virtues as well as by their business capacity, by their devotion to
intellectual and disinterested aims, and by their public spirit, and we
naturally resent being obliged to judge poor people so solely upon the
industrial side. Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm. It is
largely in this modern tendency to judge all men by one democratic
standard, while the old charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of
two standards, that much of the difficulty adheres. We know that

unceasing bodily toil becomes wearing and brutalizing, and our
position is totally untenable if we judge large numbers of our fellows
solely upon their success in maintaining it.
The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little house made
untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is no
longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her
hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over
against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained only
through status.
The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are those
who have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be through
sickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitable
reasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, and must
be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charity visitor, let us
assume, is a young college woman, well-bred and open-minded; when
she visits the family assigned to her, she is often embarrassed to find
herself obliged to lay all the stress of her teaching and advice upon the
industrial virtues, and to treat the members of the family almost
exclusively as factors in the industrial system. She insists that they
must work and be self-supporting, that the most dangerous of all
situations is idleness, that seeking one's own pleasure, while ignoring
claims and responsibilities, is the most ignoble of actions. The
members of her assigned family may have other charms and
virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of each other,
generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the industrial
side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occurs to the mind
of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been made tender by
much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no right to say
these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted to cope with
actual conditions than those of her broken-down family.
The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrial
preaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues and
housewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed,
and our views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods,

which could be applied when our consciences were in line with them,
but which are daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into
people who work with their hands and those who do not. The charity
visitor belonging to the latter class is perplexed by recognitions and
suggestions which the situation forces upon her. Our democracy has
taught us to apply our moral teaching all around, and the moralist is
rapidly becoming so sensitive that when his life does not exemplify his
ethical convictions, he finds it difficult to preach.
Added to this is a consciousness, in the mind of the visitor, of a genuine
misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of her charity, and
by their neighbors. Let us take a neighborhood of poor people, and test
their ethical standards by those of the charity visitor, who comes with
the best desire in the world to help them out of their distress. A most
striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the difference between the
emotional kindness with which relief is given by one poor neighbor to
another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with which relief is given
by a