ttlement workers are likely to say that the
sufferings of the poor are due to conditions over which the poor have
no control.

The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes; the fact being
that the personal and social causes of poverty act and react upon each
other, changing places as cause and as effect, until they form a tangle
that no hasty, impatient jerking can unravel. The charity worker and
the settlement worker have need of each other: neither one can afford
to ignore the experience of the other. Friendly visitors and all who
are trying to improve conditions in poor homes should welcome the
experience of those who are studying trade conditions and other more
general aspects of questions affecting the welfare of the poor. But
they should not permit themselves to be swept away by enthusiastic
advocates of social reform from that safe middle ground which
recognizes that character is at the {9} very centre of this complicated
problem; character in the rich, who owe the poor justice as well as
mercy, and character in the poor, who are masters of their fate to a
greater degree than they will recognize or than we will recognize for
them. To ignore the importance of character and of the discipline that
makes character is a common fault of modern philanthropy. Rich and
poor alike are pictured as the victims of circumstances, of a wrong
social order. A political writer has said that formerly, when our
forefathers became dissatisfied, they pushed farther into the
wilderness, but that now, if anything goes wrong, we run howling to
Washington, asking special legislation for our troubles. Symptoms are
not lacking of a healthy reaction from this undemocratic attitude of
mind. In so far as our charitable work affects it, let us see to it
that we do our part in restoring a tone of sturdy self-reliance and
independence to the Commonwealth.

Turning from these more general considerations, it is proposed, in this
book, to treat of various aspects of the home life of the poor as {10}
affected by charity. At the very beginning, however, it may be well to
inquire, Who are the poor? If this were a study of the needs of the
rich, we should realize at once that they are a difficult class to
generalize about; rich people are understood to differ widely from each
other in tastes, aims, virtues, and vices. The great, conglomerate
class of the rich--which is really no social class at all--has included
human beings as dif