the poor, with charity and kind-heartedness, but rather with the
opposite qualities. The rich landlord is he who collects with sternness,
who accepts no excuse, and will have his own. There are moments of
irritation and of real bitterness against him, but there is still
admiration, because he is rich and successful. The good-natured
landlord, he who pities and spares his poverty-pressed tenants, is
seldom rich. He often lives in the back of his house, which he has owned
for a long time, perhaps has inherited; but he has been able to
accumulate little. He commands the genuine love and devotion of many a
poor soul, but he is treated with a certain lack of respect. In one
sense he is a failure. The charity visitor, just because she is a person
who concerns herself with the poor, receives a certain amount of this
good-natured and kindly contempt, sometimes real affection, but little
genuine respect. The poor are accustomed to help each other and to
respond according to their kindliness; but when it comes to worldly
judgment, they use industrial success as the sole standard. In the case
of the charity visitor who has neither natural kindness nor dazzling
riches, they are deprived of both standards, and they find it of course
utterly impossible to judge of the motive of organized charity.

Even those of us who feel most sorely the need of more order in
altruistic effort and see the end to be desired, find something
distasteful in the juxtaposition of the words "organized" and "charity."
We say in defence that we are striving to turn this emotion into a
motive, that pity is capricious, and not to be depended on; that we mean
to give it the dignity of conscious duty. But at bottom we distrust a
little a scheme which substitutes a theory of social conduct for the
natural promptings of the heart, even although we appreciate the
complexity of the situation. The poor man who has fallen into distress,
when he first asks aid, instinctively expects tenderness, consideration,