“Will you ask the Doctor to go and talk with the Tailoress?” he said gently. “I think the Doctor might reach her as none of the rest can. I seem to have lost all influence over her.”
I promised to fulfil the request.
“I do not understand,” said the Altruist wistfully, “why I cannot touch people at times like this. Before this grief came, the Tailoress hung on every word I said. I sometimes feel a sense of lack, as if I cannot get near simple human moods. It is much easier for me to cope with intellectual difficulties.”
CHAPTER XXXII
“Our elaborate schemes for helping people are making us forget,” said the Doctor one day, “that the one thing human beings want is human sympathy.”
To this I assented readily.
“In the first place,” she continued, with a thoughtful air, “through all this machinery of leagues and clubs and organizations we are beginning to lose our sense of individual responsibility. As soon as we find an act of charity that ought to be done, we start a society to do it for us.”
“But when,” I protested, “has a sense of individual responsibility in regard to the poor been so strong? Social problems have never been so closely studied as they are to-day. Look at the seriousness of our young men and women! Think of Barnet House, and the College Settlement!”
“Yes, think of them,” said the Doctor. “The only trouble with the residents at Barnet House is that they have too great a sense of responsibility about other people’s lives, and too little about their own. Society has, I presume, as just a claim to a man’s best work as the poor have to his interest. Those young men do not belong to society at all, because they do not share its burdens. ‘Two men I honour, and no third,’—the man who works with his hands, and the man who works at a necessary profession. But the man who gives up all regular occupation just out of sheer benevolence I do not understand.
“And I hope,” the Doctor added grimly, “that these young socialists may be spared to share the labour of the era they are trying to usher in. There will be no more of the dolce-far-niente of doing good then, only pick-axes and spades all round, with maybe an hour off at noon! If socialism means work by all for all, I fail to see why those who advocate it should devote themselves to an existence made of a little study, a little lecturing, and much visiting, for scientific purposes, of popular amusements.”