Friendly Visiting among the Poor: A Handbook for Charity Workers

by Mary Ellen Richmond

"Yet cease not to give
Without any regard;
Though the beggars be wicked,
Thou shalt have thy reward."

The spirit of the mediaeval church, too, encouraged charitable giving in the main "as a species of fire insurance." The poor, when they were thought of at all, were too likely to be regarded as a means of saving the giver's soul. This view of poverty is either quite dead or dying, but the sentimental view, which succeeded it, is still very common. We are still inclined to take a conventional attitude toward the poor, seeing them through the comfortable haze of our own excellent intentions, and content to know that we wish them well, without being at any great pains to know them as they really are. In other words, our intentions are good, but they {5} are not always good enough to lead us to take our charitable work quite seriously, and found it solidly upon knowledge and experience.

But the century drawing to a close has seen two very important developments in charitable work in England and America; developments quite as important in their own field as the advances of the century in the art of fiction. The first of these is the wonderful growth of the spirit of individual service, which has found one of its highest expressions in the work of friendly visitors in the homes of the poor. The second is the new but vigorous growth of the spirit of social service, which has found its best expression in social and college settlements. It might be possible to prove that both these developments are merely revivals, that at several stages of the world's history the same ideas have been put forward under other names; but never before, as it seems to me, have they found such general recognition.

This gives us three tolerably well-defined phases of charitable progress: the phases of indiscriminate relief, of individual service, and {6} of social service. In the first phase, we are charitable either for the sake of our souls or else to gratify our own emotions. In the second, we are charitable for the sake of the individual poor man. In the third, we are charitable for the sake of the class to which he belongs.

Of the dangers of indiscriminate relief, it should not be necessary to speak, for much has been written on that subject; but the dangers of individual and social service have not been so frequently pointed out. These two forms of service are very closely related. It is impossible to treat the individual poor man without affecting the condition of his fellows for better or worse, and it is impossible to deal with social conditions without affecting the units that compose society. The problems of poverty must be attacked from both sides, therefore, and though I shall dwell particularly upon individual service in these pages, we should remember that, unless this service is supplemented by the work of good citizens, who shall strive to make our cities healthier and freer from temptation, our school system more {7} thorough and practical, and our public charities more effective, unless this public work also is pushed forward, our individual work in the homes of the poor will be largely in vain.

I have said that there were dangers in both forms of service. In work with individual poor families we are likely to forget that these are part of a neighborhood and community, and that we have no right to help them in a way that will work harm to the community. We are always inclined to think that the particular family in which we are interested is an "exceptional case," and the exceptional treatment lavished upon our exceptional case often rouses in a neighborhood hopes that it is impossible for us to fulfil. Then, too, occupied as we are with individuals, we are likely to exaggerate the importance of those causes of poverty that have their origin in the individual. We are likely to over emphasize the moral and mental lacks shown in bad personal habits, such as drunkenness and licentiousness, in thriftlessness, laziness, or inefficiency; and some of us are even rash enough to attribute all the ills of the poor to drink or laziness. On the other hand, those {8} who are engaged in social service often exaggerate the causes of poverty that are external to the individual. Bad industrial conditions and defective legislation seem to them the causes of nearly all the distress around them. Settlement 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 different as Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Barney Barnato. But it is the very same with the poor; and any effort to go among them for the purpose of helping them that does not frankly recognize this wide diversity, must end in failure. The charity worker must rid himself, first of all, of the conventional picture of the poor as always either very abjectly needy, or else very abjectly grateful. He must understand that an attitude of patronage toward the poor man is likely to put the patron in as ridiculous a position as Mr. Pullet, when he addressed his nephew, Tom Tulliver, as "Young Sir." Upon which George Eliot remarks: "A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence; and while you are making {11} encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer." The would-be philanthropist, who is very conscious of himself and only vaguely conscious of the object of his benevolence, is likely to seem and to be "extremely queer."

If I were writing about the rich, I should be inclined to divide them, according to their attitude toward life, into workers and parasites, but this classification will serve for the poor as well. The motto of the worker is, "I owe the world a life," and the motto of the parasite is, "The world owes me a living." When the parasite happens to be poor we call him a pauper; but there is a world of difference between poverty and pauperism. The poor man may become destitute through stress of circumstances, and be forced to accept charity, but your true pauper, be he rich or poor, has the parasitic habit of mind. When we ask ourselves then, Who are the poor? we must answer that they include widely divergent types of character,—the selfish and the {12} unselfish, the noble and the mean, workers and parasites—and that, in going among them, we must be prepared to meet human beings differing often from ourselves, it may be, in trivial and external things, but like ourselves in all else.

Some who are ready enough to recognize these rudimentary facts about the poor, question our right to go among them with the object of doing them good, regarding it as an impertinent interference with the rights of the individual. But those who hold to this view seldom have the courage of their convictions. When they see suffering, they are very likely to interfere by sending help, though this well-meant interference, unaccompanied by personal knowledge of all the circumstances, often does more harm than good, and becomes a temptation rather than a help. We must interfere when confronted by human suffering and need. Why not interfere effectively? Why not do our best to remove the causes of need?