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Page 15
Of what use is all this striving and perplexity? Has the experience any
value? It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charity
visitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do.
It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, they
claim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member of
a sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods
do, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, so
that she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, and
thus she is not harassed by a constant attempt at adjustment.
Both the tenement-house resident and the sister assume to have put
themselves upon the industrial level of their neighbors, although they
have left out the most awful element of poverty, that of imminent fear
of starvation and a neglected old age.
The young charity visitor who goes from a family living upon a most
precarious industrial level to her own home in a prosperous part of the
city, if she is sensitive at all, is never free from perplexities which
our growing democracy forces upon her.
We sometimes say that our charity is too scientific, but we would
doubtless be much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is not
scientific enough. We dislike the entire arrangement of cards
alphabetically classified according to streets and names of families,
with the unrelated and meaningless details attached to them. Our feeling
of revolt is probably not unlike that which afflicted the students of
botany and geology in the middle of the last century, when flowers were
tabulated in alphabetical order, when geology was taught by colored
charts and thin books. No doubt the students, wearied to death, many
times said that it was all too scientific, and were much perplexed and
worried when they found traces of structure and physiology which their
so-called scientific principles were totally unable to account for. But
all this happened before science had become evolutionary and scientific
at all, before it had a principle of life from within. The very
indications and discoveries which formerly perplexed, later illumined
and made the study absorbing and vital.
We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to human
affairs in general, although it is fast being applied to the education
of children. We are at last learning to follow the development of the
child; to expect certain traits under certain conditions; to adapt
methods and matter to his growing mind. No "advanced educator" can allow
himself to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to be
as to exclude the discovery of what he is. But in our charitable efforts
we think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is or of
what he may become; and we ruthlessly force our conventions and
standards upon him, with a sternness which we would consider stupid
indeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature intellectual
convictions upon an undeveloped mind.
Let us take the example of a timid child, who cries when he is put to
bed because he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted" parent stays
with him, simply because he is sorry for him and wants to comfort him.
The scientifically trained parent stays with him, because he realizes
that the child is in a stage of development in which his imagination has
the best of him, and in which it is impossible to reason him out of a
belief in ghosts. These two parents, wide apart in point of view, after
all act much alike, and both very differently from the pseudo-scientific
parent, who acts from dogmatic conviction and is sure he is right. He
talks of developing his child's self-respect and good sense, and leaves
him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and
development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our
development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and
stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated
kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the
stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the
child, who is hysterically crying upstairs and laying the foundation for
future nervous disorders. The pseudo-scientific spirit, or rather, the
undeveloped stage of our philanthropy, is perhaps most clearly revealed
in our tendency to lay constant stress on negative action. "Don't give;"
"don't break down self-respect," we are constantly told. We distrust the
human impulse as well as the teachings of our own experience, and in
their stead substitute dogmatic rules for conduct. We forget that the
accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally
result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to
life itself; that the necessity for activity and a pull upon the
sympathies is so severe, that all the knowledge in the possession of the
visitor is constantly applied, and she has a reasonable chance for an
ultimate intellectual comprehension. Indeed, part of the perplexity in
the administration of charity comes from the fact that the type of
person drawn to it is the one who insists that her convictions shall not
be unrelated to action. Her moral concepts constantly tend to float away
from her, unless they have a basis in the concrete relation of life. She
is confronted with the task of reducing her scruples to action, and of
converging many wills, so as to unite the strength of all of them into
one accomplishment, the value of which no one can foresee.
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