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
scientific enough. We dislike the entire arrangement of cards
alphabetically classified according to streets and names of families,
with the unrelated and meaningless details attached to them. Our feeling
of revolt is probably not unlike that which afflicted the students of
botany and geology in the middle of the last century, when flowers were
tabulated in alphabetical order, when geology was taught by colored
charts and thin books. No doubt the students, wearied to death, many
times said that it was all too scientific, and were much perplexed and
worried when they found traces of structure and physiology which their
so-called scientific principles were totally unable to account for. But
all this happened before science had become evolutionary and scientific
at all, before it had a principle of life from within. The very
indications and discoveries which formerly perplexed, later illumined
and made the study absorbing and vital.

We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to human
affairs in general, although it is fast being applied to the education
of children. We are at last learning to follow the development of the
child; to expect certain traits under certain conditions; to adapt
methods and matter to his growing mind. No "advanced educator" can allow
himself to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to be
as to exclude the disc