street, without a moment’s reflection upon the physical discomforts involved.  The most maligned landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to share her supper.  A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain to find work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment was secured at last.  Upon investigation it transpired that a neighbor further down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for the family friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for her non-appearance were demanded, “It broke me heart to leave the place, but what could I do?” A woman whose husband was sent up to the city prison for the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her child found herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually sold her supply of household furniture.  She took refuge with a friend whom she supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town.  When she arrived, however, she discovered that her friend’s husband had been out of work so long that they had been reduced to living in one room.  The friend, however, took her in, and the friend’s husband was obliged to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he did uncomplainingly if not cheerfully.  Fortunately it was summer, “and it only rained one night.”  The writer could not discover from the young mother that she had any special claim upon the “friend” beyond the fact that they had formerly worked together in the same factory.  The husband she had never seen until the night of her arrival, when he at once went forth in search of a midwife who would consent to come upon his promise of future payment.

The evolutionists tell us that the instinct to pity, the impulse to aid his fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of right and wrong.  There is no doubt that this rude rule still holds among many people with whom charitable agencies are brought into contact, and that their ideas of right and wrong are quite honestly outraged by the methods of these agencies.  When they see the delay and caution with which relief is given, it does not appear to them a conscientious scruple, but as the cold and calculating action of a selfish man.  It is not the aid that they are accustomed to receive from their neighbors, and they do not understand why the impulse which drives people to “be good to the poor” should be so severely supervised.  They feel, remotely, that the charity visitor is moved by motives that are alien and unreal.  They may be superior motives, but they are different, and they are “agin nature.”  They cannot comprehend why a person whose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his natural impulses, should go into charity work at all.  The only man they are accustomed to see whose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his tenderness of heart, is the selfish and avaricious man who is frankly “on the make.”  If the charity visitor is such a person, why does she pretend to like the poor?  Why does she not go into business at once?