nd.
Part of it is, no doubt, just. But as bitter criticism might be made of
much noble work at home, like that of the Associated Charities, for
instance.

In Boston, it is said, there is not one woman of any standing in society
who is not interested in some charity. Most of their work is probably
genuine. It is done from a sincere wish to do the best thing--very
likely in many cases simply to ease the importunate New England
conscience, yet also, no doubt, with the hope of relieving suffering.
But we can hardly hope that much of it is ideal since the true charity
is "Not what we give but what we share."

The women who are readiest to give their money and even their time to
the desperately poor do not like to share their pew in church with some
quiet person whom they consider below them in the social scale. Some one
tells of a woman who spent all her time in going about among the poor
giving practical help, but who really cared so little about those she
helped that every day on her return from her rounds she amused the
family by satirizing her pensioners. She could not love them, perhaps,
and it may still have been an excellent thing for her to help them.
Nevertheless, this was not the ideal charity.

There are a great many girls who would like to do some definite
charitable work. They would like to be the founders of a great charity.
They are ambitious, and their ambition is, on the whole, a noble one.
Some of them are so sweet and generous to everybody about them that I
really think they might be trusted to do something on a large scale. One
of them might even oversee an orphan asylum; yet I do not think she
could be such a blessing to little children as is a woman I know who is
the matron of such an institution, for this woman had an unsympathetic
step-mother, and she learned through a lonely childhood how to pity
motherless children, and I heard a thoughtful woman say of her orphan
asylum, "It was a shabby place, but beautiful to me because there was
such a motherly atmosphere about it."

Others of these girls are too intolerant of everybody outside their own
particular set to be allowed to do any work for the poor except to give
money, and even then there is danger they may be so lifted up by a sense
of their own goodness that perhaps it would be better for them
personally to spend the money extravagantly, for then they would
certainly be ashamed of themselves. Nevertheless, the poor need their
money, so perhap