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Page 10
The charity visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar to
spend much money upon clothes, to care so much for "appearances." She
realizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one's
home or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she is
silenced by its obvious need. She also catches a glimpse of the fact
that the disproportionate expenditure of the poor in the matter of
clothes is largely due to the exclusiveness of the rich who hide from
them the interior of their houses, and their more subtle pleasures,
while of necessity exhibiting their street clothes and their street
manners. Every one who goes shopping at the same time may see the
clothes of the richest women in town, but only those invited to her
receptions see the Corot on her walls or the bindings in her library.
The poor naturally try to bridge the difference by reproducing the
street clothes which they have seen. They are striving to conform to a
common standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs to
all of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasant
woman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheap
street hat. But it is easy to recognize the first attempt toward
democratic expression.
The charity visitor finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to
consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor; for
she cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or according
to the conventions which have regulated her own life. She finds both of
these fairly upset by her intimate knowledge of the situation, and her
sympathy for those into whose lives she has gained a curious insight.
She discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it
takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist
so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit
the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. The
charity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of early
marriages, quite naturally because she comes from a family and circle
of professional and business people. A professional man is scarcely
equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business
man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at
thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not
to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. In
many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all
trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and
thirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will
probably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep up
when he has to divide with a family--habits which he can, perhaps, never
overcome.
The sense of prudence, the necessity for saving, can never come to a
primitive, emotional man with the force of a conviction; but the
necessity of providing for his children is a powerful incentive. He
naturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them to
care for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes very
early. A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent to the Cook County
poorhouse, paralyzed beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five. Had his
little boy of nine been but a few years older, he might have been spared
this sorrow of public charity. He was, in fact, better able to well
support a family when he was twenty than when he was thirty-five, for
his wages had steadily grown less as the years went on. Another tailor
whom I know, who is also a Socialist, always speaks of saving as a
bourgeois virtue, one quite impossible to the genuine workingman. He
supports a family consisting of himself, a wife and three children, and
his two parents on eight dollars a week. He insists it would be criminal
not to expend every penny of this amount upon food and shelter, and he
expects his children later to care for him.
This economic pressure also accounts for the tendency to put children to
work overyoung and thus cripple their chances for individual
development and usefulness, and with the avaricious parent also leads to
exploitation. "I have fed her for fourteen years, now she can help me
pay my mortgage" is not an unusual reply when a hardworking father is
expostulated with because he would take his bright daughter out of
school and put her into a factory.
It has long been a common error for the charity visitor, who is strongly
urging her "family" toward self-support, to suggest, or at least
connive, that the children be put to work early, although she has not
the excuse that the parents have. It is so easy, after one has been
taking the industrial view for a long time, to forget the larger and
more social claim; to urge that the boy go to work and support his
parents, who are receiving charitable aid. She does not realize what a
cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives
advice.
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