“I do not agree with you,” said the Altruist. “They will instinctively gain more delicate shades of feeling by coming in contact with us—”
I think that the Doctor was really angry.
“For true delicacy of feeling,” she said, “commend me to the very poor. We ought to go down on our knees to learn of them. The kindness, forbearance, patience, and the quiet heroism of the poor are almost beyond our grasp. Look at it! We haven’t their opportunity for cultivating the virtues,—unselfishness, for instance. They have none of the modern methods for doing their duty to their neighbours without letting it cost anything. They know nothing about ‘organizations.’ They actually think that the only way to help is by kindness. As for us, humanity has been civilized out of us.”
“The poor ought to be informed of this at once,” said Janet, “and ought to be urged to start a society for the cultivation of humane instincts among the well-to-do.”
“You do find,” admitted the Altruist, “a certain primitive generosity among the lower classes. But when you say that they do not need the refining influences of culture, I do not understand you.”
“I mean,” said the Doctor, “that we are absurd when we talk of teaching the lower classes rightness of feeling, for by good rights they ought to teach us. So far as I know, the moral forces are not the result of culture. They work up from below. There has never been a great reform that did not originate with the so-called ‘People.’ All that culture can do is occasionally to supply directing power, cold brain force, to the impulse of the masses. Something deeper than thought, in the primary instincts of the masses, keeps the race sane, healthy, right at heart.”
“It is strange to hear that,” mused the Altruist, “in the face of the awful degradation and the crying sin of the slums of this city. Nothing short of miraculous regeneration, physical, mental, and spiritual, can save them.”
“What is it that Whitman says?” asked Janet. Then she quoted softly:
“‘In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,