Democracy and Social Ethics | Page 6

charity visitor to a charity recipient. The neighborhood mind is at
once confronted not only by the difference of method, but by an
absolute clashing of two ethical standards.
A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is sufficient
to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly relations. There
is the greatest willingness to lend or borrow anything, and all the
residents of the given tenement know the most intimate family affairs
of all the others. The fact that the economic condition of all alike is on
a most precarious level makes the ready outflow of sympathy and
material assistance the most natural thing in the world. There are
numberless instances of self-sacrifice quite unknown in the circles
where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimate
knowledge of one's neighbors impossible. An Irish family in which the
man has lost his place, and the woman is struggling to eke out the
scanty savings by day's work, will take in the widow and her five
children who have been turned into the street, without a moment's
reflection upon the physical discomforts involved. The most maligned
landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to
lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to

share her supper. A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain
to find work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment
was secured at last. Upon investigation it transpired that a neighbor
further down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for the family
friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for her
non-appearance were demanded, "It broke me heart to leave the place,
but what could I do?" A woman whose husband was sent up to the city
prison for the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her
child found herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually
sold her supply of household furniture. She took refuge with a friend
whom she supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town.
When she arrived, however, she discovered that her friend's husband
had been out of work so long that they had been reduced to living in
one room. The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband
was obliged to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week,
which he did uncomplainingly if not cheerfully. Fortunately it was
summer, "and it only rained one night." The writer could not discover
from the young mother that she had any special claim upon the "friend"
beyond the fact that they had formerly worked together in the same
factory. The husband she had never seen until the night of her arrival,
when he at once went forth in search of a midwife who would consent
to come upon his promise of future payment.
The evolutionists tell us that the instinct to pity, the impulse to aid his
fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of right and
wrong. There is no doubt that this rude rule still holds among many
people with whom charitable agencies are brought into contact, and that
their ideas of right and wrong are quite honestly outraged by the
methods of these agencies. When they see the delay and caution with
which relief is given, it does not appear to them a conscientious scruple,
but as the cold and calculating action of a selfish man. It is not the aid
that they are accustomed to receive from their neighbors, and they do
not understand why the impulse which drives people to "be good to the
poor" should be so severely supervised. They feel, remotely, that the
charity visitor is moved by motives that are alien and unreal. They may
be superior motives, but they are different, and they are "agin nature."
They cannot comprehend why a person whose intellectual perceptions

are stronger than his natural impulses, should go into charity work at all.
The only man they are accustomed to see whose intellectual
perceptions are stronger than his tenderness of heart, is the selfish and
avaricious man who is frankly "on the make." If the charity visitor is
such a person, why does she pretend to like the poor? Why does she not
go into business at once?
We may say, of course, that it is a primitive view of life, which thus
confuses intellectuality and business ability; but it is a view quite
honestly held by many poor people who are obliged to receive charity
from time to time. In moments of indignation the poor have been
known to say: "What do you want, anyway? If you have nothing to give
us,