Democracy and Social Ethics | Page 8

it shows itself in a tendency to "work" the relief-giving agencies.
The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon
the charitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human
love and sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree. The
spontaneous impulse to sit up all night with the neighbor's sick child is
turned into righteous indignation against the district nurse, because she
goes home at six o'clock, and doesn't do it herself. Or the kindness
which would have prompted the quick purchase of much needed
medicine is transformed into a voluble scoring of the dispensary,
because it gives prescriptions and not drugs; and "who can get well on
a piece of paper?"
If a poor woman knows that her neighbor next door has no shoes, she is
quite willing to lend her own, that her neighbor may go decently to
mass, or to work; for she knows the smallest item about the scanty
wardrobe, and cheerfully helps out. When the charity visitor comes in,
all the neighbors are baffled as to what her circumstances may be. They
know she does not need a new pair of shoes, and rather suspect that she
has a dozen pairs at home; which, indeed, she sometimes has. They
imagine untold stores which they may call upon, and her most generous
gift is considered niggardly, compared with what she might do. She
ought to get new shoes for the family all round, "she sees well enough
that they need them." It is no more than the neighbor herself would do,
has practically done, when she lent her own shoes. The charity visitor
has broken through the natural rule of giving, which, in a primitive
society, is bounded only by the need of the recipient and the resources
of the giver; and she gets herself into untold trouble when she is judged

by the ethics of that primitive society.
The neighborhood understands the selfish rich people who stay in their
own part of town, where all their associates have shoes and other things.
Such people don't bother themselves about the poor; they are like the
rich landlords of the neighborhood experience. But this lady visitor,
who pretends to be good to the poor, and certainly does talk as though
she were kind-hearted, what does she come for, if she does not intend
to give them things which are so plainly needed?
The visitor says, sometimes, that in holding her poor family so hard to
a standard of thrift she is really breaking down a rule of higher living
which they formerly possessed; that saving, which seems quite
commendable in a comfortable part of town, appears almost criminal in
a poorer quarter where the next-door neighbor needs food, even if the
children of the family do not.
She feels the sordidness of constantly being obliged to urge the
industrial view of life. The benevolent individual of fifty years ago
honestly believed that industry and self-denial in youth would result in
comfortable possessions for old age. It was, indeed, the method he had
practised in his own youth, and by which he had probably obtained
whatever fortune he possessed. He therefore reproved the poor family
for indulging their children, urged them to work long hours, and was
utterly untouched by many scruples which afflict the contemporary
charity visitor. She says sometimes, "Why must I talk always of getting
work and saving money, the things I know nothing about? If it were
anything else I had to urge, I could do it; anything like Latin prose,
which I had worried through myself, it would not be so hard." But she
finds it difficult to connect the experiences of her youth with the
experiences of the visited family.
Because of this diversity in experience, the visitor is continually
surprised to find that the safest platitude may be challenged. She refers
quite naturally to the "horrors of the saloon," and discovers that the
head of her visited family does not connect them with "horrors" at all.
He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the free lunch
and treating which goes on, even when a man is out of work and not

able to pay up; the loan of five dollars he got there when the charity
visitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction. He may
listen politely to her reference to "horrors," but considers it only
"temperance talk."
The charity visitor may blame the women for lack of gentleness toward
their children, for being hasty and rude to them, until she learns that the
standard of breeding is not that of gentleness toward the children so
much as the observance of certain conventions, such as the punctilious
wearing of mourning garments after the death of a child. The standard
of gentleness each