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Page 12
The charity visitor finds these subtle and elusive problems most
harrowing. The head of a family she is visiting is a man who has become
black-listed in a strike. He is not a very good workman, and this, added
to his agitator's reputation, keeps him out of work for a long time. The
fatal result of being long out of work follows: he becomes less and less
eager for it, and gets a "job" less and less frequently. In order to
keep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife's respect for
him, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idleness
follows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes a
martyr. Deep down in his heart perhaps--but who knows what may be deep
down in his heart? Whatever may be in his wife's, she does not show for
an instant that she thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed to see her
earn, by sewing and cleaning, most of the scanty income for the family.
The charity visitor, however, does see this, and she also sees that the
other men who were in the strike have gone back to work. She further
knows by inquiry and a little experience that the man is not skilful.
She cannot, however, call him lazy and good-for-nothing, and denounce
him as worthless as her grandmother might have done, because of certain
intellectual conceptions at which she has arrived. She sees other
workmen come to him for shrewd advice; she knows that he spends many
more hours in the public library reading good books than the average
workman has time to do. He has formed no bad habits and has yielded only
to those subtle temptations toward a life of leisure which come to the
intellectual man. He lacks the qualifications which would induce his
union to engage him as a secretary or organizer, but he is a constant
speaker at workingmen's meetings, and takes a high moral attitude on the
questions discussed there. He contributes a certain intellectuality to
his friends, and he has undoubted social value. The neighboring women
confide to the charity visitor their sympathy with his wife, because
she has to work so hard, and because her husband does not "provide."
Their remarks are sharpened by a certain resentment toward the
superiority of the husband's education and gentle manners. The charity
visitor is ashamed to take this point of view, for she knows that it is
not altogether fair. She is reminded of a college friend of hers, who
told her that she was not going to allow her literary husband to write
unworthy potboilers for the sake of earning a living. "I insist that we
shall live within my own income; that he shall not publish until he is
ready, and can give his genuine message." The charity visitor recalls
what she has heard of another acquaintance, who urged her husband to
decline a lucrative position as a railroad attorney, because she wished
him to be free to take municipal positions, and handle public questions
without the inevitable suspicion which unaccountably attaches itself in
a corrupt city to a corporation attorney. The action of these two women
seemed noble to her, but in their cases they merely lived on a lesser
income. In the case of the workingman's wife, she faced living on no
income at all, or on the precarious one which she might be able to get
together.
She sees that this third woman has made the greatest sacrifice, and she
is utterly unwilling to condemn her while praising the friends of her
own social position. She realizes, of course, that the situation is
changed by the fact that the third family needs charity, while the other
two do not; but, after all, they have not asked for it, and their plight
was only discovered through an accident to one of the children. The
charity visitor has been taught that her mission is to preserve the
finest traits to be found in her visited family, and she shrinks from
the thought of convincing the wife that her husband is worthless and she
suspects that she might turn all this beautiful devotion into
complaining drudgery. To be sure, she could give up visiting the family
altogether, but she has become much interested in the progress of the
crippled child who eagerly anticipates her visits, and she also suspects
that she will never know many finer women than the mother. She is
unwilling, therefore, to give up the friendship, and goes on bearing her
perplexities as best she may.
The first impulse of our charity visitor is to be somewhat severe with
her shiftless family for spending money on pleasures and indulging their
children out of all proportion to their means. The poor family which
receives beans and coal from the county, and pays for a bicycle on the
instalment plan, is not unknown to any of us. But as the growth of
juvenile crime becomes gradually understood, and as the danger of giving
no legitimate and organized pleasure to the child becomes clearer, we
remember that primitive man had games long before he cared for a house
or regular meals.
There are certain boys in many city neighborhoods who form themselves
into little gangs with a leader who is somewhat more intrepid than the
rest. Their favorite performance is to break into an untenanted house,
to knock off the faucets, and cut the lead pipe, which they sell to the
nearest junk dealer. With the money thus procured they buy beer and
drink it in little free-booter's groups sitting in the alley. From
beginning to end they have the excitement of knowing that they may be
seen and caught by the "coppers," and are at times quite breathless with
suspense. It is not the least unlike, in motive and execution, the
practice of country boys who go forth in squads to set traps for rabbits
or to round up a coon.
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