fies charity visitors
when it shows itself in a tendency to "work" the relief-giving agencies.

The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon the
charitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human love
and sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree. The
spontaneous impulse to sit up all night with the neighbor's sick child
is turned into righteous indignation against the district nurse,
because she goes home at six o'clock, and doesn't do it herself. Or the
kindness which would have prompted the quick purchase of much needed
medicine is transformed into a voluble scoring of the dispensary,
because it gives prescriptions and not drugs; and "who can get well on a
piece of paper?"

If a poor woman knows that her neighbor next door has no shoes, she is
quite willing to lend her own, that her neighbor may go decently to
mass, or to work; for she knows the smallest item about the scanty
wardrobe, and cheerfully helps out. When the charity visitor comes in,
all the neighbors are baffled as to what her circumstances may be. They
know she does not need a new pair of shoes, and rather suspect that she
has a dozen pairs at home; which, indeed, she sometimes has. They
imagine untold stores which they may call upon, and her most generous
gift is considered niggardly, compared with what she might do. She ought
to get new shoes for the family all round, "she sees well enough that
they need them." It is no more than the neighbor herself would do, has
practically done, when she lent her own shoes. The charity visitor has
broken through the natural rule of giving, which, in a primitive
society, is bounded only by the need of the recipient and the resources
of the giver; and she gets herself into untold trouble when she is
judged by the ethics of that primitive society.

The neighborhood understands the selfish rich people who stay in their
own part of town, where all their associates have shoes and other
things. Such people don't bother themselves about the poor; they are
like the rich landlords of the neighborhood experience. But this lady
visitor, who pretends to be good to the poor, and certainly does talk as
though she were kind-hearted, what does she come for, if she does not
intend to give them things which are so plainly needed?

The visitor says, sometimes, that in holding her poor family so hard to
a standard of thrift she is really breaking down a rule of higher living
which