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Page 6
The six following chapters are studies of various types and groups who
are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance
of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct.
No attempt is made to reach a conclusion, nor to offer advice beyond the
assumption that the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy,
but the quite unlooked-for result of the studies would seem to indicate
that while the strain and perplexity of the situation is felt most
keenly by the educated and self-conscious members of the community, the
tentative and actual attempts at adjustment are largely coming through
those who are simpler and less analytical.
CHAPTER II
CHARITABLE EFFORT
All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy,
which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away
from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to
act upon them.
Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a
course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct,
which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing
moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the
strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon
another.
Probably there is no relation in life which our democracy is changing
more rapidly than the charitable relation--that relation which obtains
between benefactor and beneficiary; at the same time there is no point
of contact in our modern experience which reveals so clearly the lack of
that equality which democracy implies. We have reached the moment when
democracy has made such inroads upon this relationship, that the
complacency of the old-fashioned charitable man is gone forever; while,
at the same time, the very need and existence of charity, denies us the
consolation and freedom which democracy will at last give.
It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined,
and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based upon
convictions which we no longer hold. Thus our estimate of the effect of
environment and social conditions has doubtless shifted faster than our
methods of administrating charity have changed. Formerly when it was
believed that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness, and that
the prosperous man was the righteous man, charity was administered
harshly with a good conscience; for the charitable agent really blamed
the individual for his poverty, and the very fact of his own superior
prosperity gave him a certain consciousness of superior morality. We
have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have
ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect; while
it is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its possession
is by no means assumed to imply the possession of the highest moral
qualities. We have learned to judge men by their social virtues as well
as by their business capacity, by their devotion to intellectual and
disinterested aims, and by their public spirit, and we naturally resent
being obliged to judge poor people so solely upon the industrial side.
Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm. It is largely in this
modern tendency to judge all men by one democratic standard, while the
old charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of two standards, that
much of the difficulty adheres. We know that unceasing bodily toil
becomes wearing and brutalizing, and our position is totally untenable
if we judge large numbers of our fellows solely upon their success in
maintaining it.
The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little house
made untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is
no longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her
hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over
against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained
only through status.
The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are those
who have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be through
sickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitable
reasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, and
must be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charity
visitor, let us assume, is a young college woman, well-bred and
open-minded; when she visits the family assigned to her, she is often
embarrassed to find herself obliged to lay all the stress of her
teaching and advice upon the industrial virtues, and to treat the
members of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrial
system. She insists that they must work and be self-supporting, that the
most dangerous of all situations is idleness, that seeking one's own
pleasure, while ignoring claims and responsibilities, is the most
ignoble of actions. The members of her assigned family may have other
charms and virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of each
other, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the
industrial side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occurs
to the mind of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been made
tender by much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no right
to say these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted to
cope with actual conditions than those of her broken-down family.
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