Even so, why should the rest of us feel it's our duty to help? Why not wait until the rich come to ask our advice, if they're troubled? Ah, but they wouldn't. They couldn't. The rich have their pride. Their unfortunate weakness for money may blacken their lives, but they suffer in silence. They try to conceal it all from us. Their feverish attempts to find some sunshine in life every evening, the desperate and futile migrations they make each few months, and the pathetic mental deadness of their gatherings, they try to keep private. We might never know to what straits many rich folk have come, were it not for the newspapers and their kindly society columns. Bless their noble insistence on showing us the lives of the rich, their portraying with such faithful care each detail of their ways!
It is no easy matter to reform these rich people offhand. Just to call at their houses and advise them, when you aren't too busy—that would be a kindness, of course, but quite far from a cure. Besides, they might even resent your little calls as intrusions. A good-hearted reformer would certainly endanger his comfort, and he might risk his life, trying to get in past rich people's butlers. Don't go in those districts at all, that is this League's advice. The drinking, bad language, the quarrels and shooting affrays, armed watchmen, fast motors—all these make those streets quite unsuited for decent folks' use.
What, then, shall we do? We can't just walk selfishly off and go mind our own business. The rich are our brothers. How can the rest of us let ourselves be truly happy when our brothers are suffering?
That's where this League steps forward. This League will provide ways in which any reformer can help.
(1) It plans to establish neighborhood houses in all the rich centers, where those who can stand it can go and live just like the rich. It will thus enable a few of us to mingle with them, day by day, and gradually brighten their outlook and better their standards.
(2) It will send trained welfare workers to inspect the most desperate cases and gently reform one by one their conditions of living.
(3) It will instruct volunteers in the best methods of rich relief work, especially methods of relieving the rich of their wealth.
The most common type we treat is the man who is making great efforts to keep other people from getting his money away from him. Such a man is always in a nervous, excitable state. In fact our statistics show that many died from this strain. The typical case gets a temperature daily, from what he sees in the papers, about the attacks which radical persons are constantly making on property. Inflammation sets in, and his outbursts grow more noisy and violent. He practically racks himself to pieces. It is a most painful end.
Other men try to invest money securely. This is a strain too. It leads to constant worries and losses, no matter what they invest in. Again, every man of means is exposed to innumerable skillful appeals to devote all he has to some new educational uses, or to lend it to friends in great need, or give aid to the sick. These appeals are so pressing that it wears out a man's strength to refuse them; and yet, since they are endless, he must. He can't give to them all. He must practice ways of dodging the determined askers who hunt him and trail him. Rich women, alone with their mail on a bright sunny morning, must learn to throw even the most pathetic circulars in the waste-paper-basket. In other words they must harden their hearts. But that hardens their arteries. It also gives them a disagreeable disposition; and that's quite a load.
It means much to the rich when our League takes these weights off their minds.