dangerous to break down the lower, unless the higher is made clear.

Just when our affection becomes large enough to care for the unworthy
among the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our own kin, is
certainly a perplexing question. To say that it should never be so, is a
comment upon our democratic relations to them which few of us would be
willing to make.

Of what use is all this striving and perplexity? Has the experience any
value? It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charity
visitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do.
It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, they
claim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member of
a sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods
do, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, so
that she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, and
thus she is not harassed by a constant attempt at adjustment.

Both the tenement-house resident and the sister assume to have put
themselves upon the industrial level of their neighbors, although they
have left out the most awful element of poverty, that of imminent fear
of starvation and a neglected old age.

The young charity visitor who goes from a family living upon a most
precarious industrial level to her own home in a prosperous part of the
city, if she is sensitive at all, is never free from perplexities which
our growing democracy forces upon her.

We sometimes say that our charity is too scientific, but we would
doubtless be much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is not