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 they formerly possessed; that saving, which seems quite commendable in a comfortable part of town, appears almost criminal in a poorer quarter where the next-door neighbor needs food, even if the children of the family do not.

She feels the sordidness of constantly being obliged to urge the industrial view of life.  The benevolent individual of fifty years ago honestly believed that industry and self-denial in youth would result in comfortable possessions for old age.  It was, indeed, the method he had practised in his own youth, and by which he had probably obtained whatever fortune he possessed.  He therefore reproved the poor family for indulging their children, urged them to work long hours, and was utterly untouched by many scruples which afflict the contemporary charity visitor.  She says sometimes, “Why must I talk always of getting work and saving money, the things I know nothing about?  If it were anything else I had to urge, I could do it; anything like Latin prose, which I had worried through myself, it would not be so hard.”  But she finds it difficult to connect the experiences of her youth with the experiences of the visited family.

Because of this diversity in experience, the visitor is continually surprised to find that the safest platitude may be challenged.  She refers quite naturally to the “horrors of the saloon,” and discovers that the head of her visited family does not connect them with “horrors” at all.  He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the free lunch and treating which goes on, even when a man is out of work and not able to pay up; the loan of five dollars he got there when the charity visitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction.  He may listen politely to her reference to “horrors,” but considers it only “temperance talk.”