he little house
made untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is
no longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her
hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over
against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained
only through status.

The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are those
who have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be through
sickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitable
reasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, and
must be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charity
visitor, let us assume, is a young college woman, well-bred and
open-minded; when she visits the family assigned to her, she is often
embarrassed to find herself obliged to lay all the stress of her
teaching and advice upon the industrial virtues, and to treat the
members of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrial
system. She insists that they must work and be self-supporting, that the
most dangerous of all situations is idleness, that seeking one's own
pleasure, while ignoring claims and responsibilities, is the most
ignoble of actions. The members of her assigned family may have other
charms and virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of each
other, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the
industrial side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occurs
to the mind of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been made
tender by much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no right
to say these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted to
cope with actual conditions than those of her broken-down family.

The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrial
preaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues and
housewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed, and
our views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods, which
could be applied when our consciences were in line with them, but which
are daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into people who work
with their hands and those who do not. The charity visitor belonging to
the latter class is perplexed by recognitions and suggestions which the
situation forces upon her. Our democracy has taught us to apply our
moral teaching all around, and the moralist is rapidly becomi