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