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Page 7
The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrial
preaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues and
housewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed, and
our views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods, which
could be applied when our consciences were in line with them, but which
are daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into people who work
with their hands and those who do not. The charity visitor belonging to
the latter class is perplexed by recognitions and suggestions which the
situation forces upon her. Our democracy has taught us to apply our
moral teaching all around, and the moralist is rapidly becoming so
sensitive that when his life does not exemplify his ethical convictions,
he finds it difficult to preach.
Added to this is a consciousness, in the mind of the visitor, of a
genuine misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of her
charity, and by their neighbors. Let us take a neighborhood of poor
people, and test their ethical standards by those of the charity
visitor, who comes with the best desire in the world to help them out of
their distress. A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the
difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by
one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with
which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient. The
neighborhood mind is at once confronted not only by the difference of
method, but by an absolute clashing of two ethical standards.
A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is
sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly
relations. There is the greatest willingness to lend or borrow anything,
and all the residents of the given tenement know the most intimate
family affairs of all the others. The fact that the economic condition
of all alike is on a most precarious level makes the ready outflow of
sympathy and material assistance the most natural thing in the world.
There are numberless instances of self-sacrifice quite unknown in the
circles where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimate
knowledge of one's neighbors impossible. An Irish family in which the
man has lost his place, and the woman is struggling to eke out the
scanty savings by day's work, will take in the widow and her five
children who have been turned into the street, without a moment's
reflection upon the physical discomforts involved. The most maligned
landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to
lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to
share her supper. A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain to
find work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment was
secured at last. Upon investigation it transpired that a neighbor
further down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for the
family friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for her
non-appearance were demanded, "It broke me heart to leave the place, but
what could I do?" A woman whose husband was sent up to the city prison
for the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her child
found herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually sold
her supply of household furniture. She took refuge with a friend whom
she supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town. When
she arrived, however, she discovered that her friend's husband had been
out of work so long that they had been reduced to living in one room.
The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband was obliged
to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he did
uncomplainingly if not cheerfully. Fortunately it was summer, "and it
only rained one night." The writer could not discover from the young
mother that she had any special claim upon the "friend" beyond the fact
that they had formerly worked together in the same factory. The husband
she had never seen until the night of her arrival, when he at once went
forth in search of a midwife who would consent to come upon his promise
of future payment.
The evolutionists tell us that the instinct to pity, the impulse to aid
his fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of right
and wrong. There is no doubt that this rude rule still holds among many
people with whom charitable agencies are brought into contact, and that
their ideas of right and wrong are quite honestly outraged by the
methods of these agencies. When they see the delay and caution with
which relief is given, it does not appear to them a conscientious
scruple, but as the cold and calculating action of a selfish man. It is
not the aid that they are accustomed to receive from their neighbors,
and they do not understand why the impulse which drives people to "be
good to the poor" should be so severely supervised. They feel,
remotely, that the charity visitor is moved by motives that are alien
and unreal. They may be superior motives, but they are different, and
they are "agin nature." They cannot comprehend why a person whose
intellectual perceptions are stronger than his natural impulses, should
go into charity work at all. The only man they are accustomed to see
whose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his tenderness of
heart, is the selfish and avaricious man who is frankly "on the make."
If the charity visitor is such a person, why does she pretend to like
the poor? Why does she not go into business at once?
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