he 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?

We may say, of course, that it is a primitive view of life, which thus
confuses i