overy of what he is. But in our charitable efforts
we think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is or of
what he may become; and we ruthlessly force our conventions and
standards upon him, with a sternness which we would consider stupid
indeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature intellectual
convictions upon an undeveloped mind.

Let us take the example of a timid child, who cries when he is put to
bed because he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted" parent stays
with him, simply because he is sorry for him and wants to comfort him.
The scientifically trained parent stays with him, because he realizes
that the child is in a stage of development in which his imagination has
the best of him, and in which it is impossible to reason him out of a
belief in ghosts. These two parents, wide apart in point of view, after
all act much alike, and both very differently from the pseudo-scientific
parent, who acts from dogmatic conviction and is sure he is right. He
talks of developing his child's self-respect and good sense, and leaves
him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and
development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our
development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and
stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated
kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the
stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the
child, who is hysterically crying upstairs and laying the foundation for
future nervous disorders. The pseudo-scientific spirit, or rather, the
undeveloped stage of our philanthropy, is perhaps most clearly revealed
in our tendency to lay constant stress on negative action. "Don't give;"
"don't break down self-respect," we are constantly told. We distrust the
human impulse as well as the teachings of our own experience, and in
their stead substitute dogmatic rules for conduct. We forget that the
accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally
result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to
life itself; that the necessity for activity and a pull upon the
sympathies is so severe, that all the knowledge in the possession of the
visitor is constantly applied, and she has a reasonable chance for an
ultimate intellectual comprehension. Indeed, part of the perplexity in
the administration of charity comes from the fact that the