eau, the father of them all, sending his children (the children of
his body, I mean) to the foundling asylum, is a notorious example of this;
and John Howard is another. I have in my own experience found these people
impossible to live with.

Let me illustrate this tendency to forget the common laws of personal
integrity by allusion to a novel which comes from another
college-settlement source. It is a story called, I think, _The Burden of
Christopher_, published three or four years ago,--a clever book withal and
rather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from his
university, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued with
college-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordance
with the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed by
competitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in his
hands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of his
factory and the consequent distress of his people, he appropriates this
trust money for his business. In the end he fails, the crash comes, and,
as I recollect it, he commits suicide. All well and good; but in a
paragraph toward the end of the book, indeed by the whole trend of the
story, we discover that the humanitarian sympathy which led the hero to
sacrifice his individual integrity for the weal of his work-people is
a higher law in the author's estimation than the old moral sense which
would have made his personal integrity of the first importance to himself
and to the world.

I submit to you, my dear reviewer, that such notions are subversive of
right thinking and are in fact the poisonous fruit of an era which has
relaxed its hold on any ideal outside of material well-being. For that
reason when I read in Miss Addams's book such words as these, "Evil does
not shock us as it once did," I am filled with anger. I wonder at the
blindness of the age when I read further such a perversion of truth as
this: "We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and
have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive
respect."--Have we?

XIV

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

I am troubled lest the letter I wrote yesterday should have seemed to
breathe more of personal bitterness than of philosophic judgment. Did I
make clear that my hostility to modern humanitarianism is not due to any
contempt for charity or for the desire of universal justice? I dislike and
distrust it fo