Part 5 (1/2)
With all the charities provided for the sick, there is still need of better provision in this country for convalescents, who are sent from the hospitals too weak to resume work, and still needing rest, good food, and pure air to effect a complete cure.
Two cla.s.ses of invalids remain to be mentioned in this condensed summary. First, accident cases, in which the visitor must be careful to see that legal redress is obtained when the case is one for damages, and must, at the same time, protect the victim from lawyers who are glad to take a sure case for ”half the proceeds.” Second, incurables, for whom homes are provided requiring an entrance fee, or for whom, more often, nothing remains but the almshouse. The visitor can sometimes secure the cooperation of friends and charities interested, and so raise enough money to provide the fee for such an invalid, when, without cooperation, as much money and more would be spent and the patient remain in the end unprovided for. Charitable people often {105} get tired; they will do a great deal for a while, and will then get interested elsewhere, and grudge the help that is still needed. In view of this failing, it is much better, in making plans for incurables, to secure a lump sum that will make adequate provision, than to depend upon the continued interest of a number of people.
The migration of invalids is the last point upon which I shall attempt to touch under this head. Any one who has visited California, Florida, Colorado, or any other part of our country where climatic conditions are supposed to be favorable for invalids, will realize the irresponsible way in which charitable people are accustomed to send the sick where they do not belong. The worst of it is that the sudden change of climate and the impossibility of securing proper care, so far from effecting a cure, in many cases hasten death. ”The saddest thing about the life of a Denver minister,” writes Rev. Samuel A. Eliot, ”is the number of lonely funerals that he is called upon to attend. Often I have been hastily summoned to say a prayer over some poor body at the undertaker's {106} shop, where there would be present just the undertaker and the minister, with perhaps the keeper of the boarding-house where the lad died or an officer of the Charity Organization Society. I look at the youthful victim of ignorant good-will borne to his neglected grave, I imagine the mother and sisters in the farmhouse on the New England hillside, whose tenderness might have soothed his last hours, and I think with bitterness of the well-meant but misdirected charity which condemned him to a miserable exile and a forlorn death.” [2]
It must be remembered that change of climate is helpful only in the earlier stages of disease, and only then when the patient is able to live in comparative comfort, free from worry and anxiety. To send invalids to a strange place in the name of charity, without providing them with the means of subsistence, is the refinement of cruelty.
Collateral Readings: Publications of local Board of Health.
Proceedings of International Congress of Charities, Chicago, 1893, volume on ”Hospitals, Dispensaries, {107} and Nursing.” ”Instructive District Nursing,” M. K. Sedgewick in ”Forum,” Vol. XXII, pp. 297 _sq_.
”The Feeble-minded,” Dr. George H. Knight in Proceedings of Twenty-second National Conference of Charities, pp. 150 _sq_. See also discussion in same volume, pp. 460 _sq_. ”The Care of Epileptics,”
William P. Letchworth in Proceedings of Twenty-third National Conference of Charities, pp. 199 _sq_. ”Industrial Education of Epileptics,” Dr. William P. Spratling in Proceedings of Twenty-fourth National Conference of Charities, pp. 69 _sq_. ”Dest.i.tute Convalescents: After Care of the Insane,” Dr. Richard Dewey in the same, pp. 76 _sq_. See also discussion on pp. 464 _sq_.
[1] ”American Charities,” p. 40.
[2] Proceedings of the Nineteenth Conference of Charities, Denver, 1892, pp. 91 _sq_.
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CHAPTER VII
SPENDING AND SAVING
There is a new school of philanthropists that are inclined to make light of thrift, and to cla.s.s both industry and thrift among the merely ”economic virtues.” To this school must belong the settlement worker who spoke of thrift as ”ordinarily rather demoralizing.” [1] But another objection to thrift which has been made by settlement workers is that it was only good for the working cla.s.ses ”until their employers discovered that there was a margin to their employees' wages.”
Is it true that industry and thrift are merely economic virtues?We instinctively feel that they are something more. One has only to think of a lazy man to get an impression of something essentially contemptible and {109} cowardly. On the other hand the man that loves work and throws himself into it with energy is winning more than material rewards. The thriftless and the extravagant, whether rich or poor, are often mean and self-indulgent, lacking the first quality of the unselfish in lacking self-control. In teaching industry and thrift, therefore,--though these virtues, like others, have an unlovely side,--we may feel that we are dealing with two of the elements out of which not only character but all the social virtues are built.
Nor will the pessimistic theory that the worker must spend as much as possible on indifferent food and housing in order to keep up the rate of wages, bear the light of common sense. It is true that the man who merely h.o.a.rds for the sake of h.o.a.rding, developing no new and higher wants, no clearly defined aims, will still be almost as helpless as the most thriftless. But no one is more helpless against the encroachments of employers than the man who lives from hand to mouth, whose necessities press ever hard upon him, crippling him and crippling those {110} with whom he competes in the open market. Then again, successful cooperation is impossible to the thriftless. The lack of self-control, the lack of power to defer their pleasures, unfits them for combined effort and makes it more difficult for them to be loyal to their fellow-workmen. Visitors can advocate thrift, therefore, for both economic and moral reasons.
There is a use of the word ”thrift” that may help us to realize its best meaning. Gardeners call a plant of vigorous growth a ”thrifty”
plant. Let us bear this in mind in our charitable work, and remember that anything that hinders vigorous growth is essentially unthrifty.
Thrift means something more than the h.o.a.rding of small savings. In fact, saving at the expense of health, or training, or some other necessary preparation for successful living, is always unthrifty. It is unthrifty to live in damp rooms to secure cheaper rent; it is unthrifty to put aside money for burial insurance when the children are underfed; it is unthrifty either to buy patent medicines or to neglect early symptoms of disease in order to save a doctor's bill; above all, it {111} is unthrifty to take young children away from school and force them to become breadwinners. Thrift, therefore, includes spending as well as saving.
Charity workers often complain that, in the poor families known to them, thrift is impossible, because there is nothing to save. More often than not this means that their relations with the poor have ceased as soon as acute distress is past, and that they have stopped visiting at the very time when improved material conditions have made the best friendly services possible.
Any attempt to divide the poor into cla.s.ses is to be deprecated, because human beings are not easily cla.s.sified. But, speaking roughly, and using the cla.s.sification merely as a temporary convenience, charity workers will find that the thrift habit divides the poor into three cla.s.ses. First, those who are very thrifty, and this is a large cla.s.s.
Misfortune may overtake the most provident during long periods of industrial depression, or they may become temporarily dependent through sickness or some unforeseen accident. The second cla.s.s includes {112} those who are willing to work when work is plentiful, but who have little persistence or resourcefulness in procuring work. In the busy season they spend lavishly on cheap pleasures and soon become applicants for relief in troubled times. Debt has no terrors for them, and, from their point of view, it is useless to save because they cannot save enough to make it seem worth while. In the third cla.s.s we find the lazy and vicious, who s.h.i.+rk work, and, living by their wits, are better off in bad times than in good. ”It is with the second cla.s.s that the charitable may work lasting harm or lasting good. To let them feel that no responsibility rests with them during the busy season, and that all the responsibility rests with us to relieve their needs when the busy season is over, rapidly pushes them into the third cla.s.s. To teach them, on the other hand, the power and c.u.mulative value of the saving habit, and so get them beforehand with the world, is to place them in the first cla.s.s and soon render them independent of our material help.” [2]
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A characteristic of the second cla.s.s is the habit of buying on credit.
The book at the corner grocery not only tempts the purchaser into buying unnecessary things, but the prices are higher than the market rate for inferior goods. A student in a university laboratory, who is also a friendly visitor, had occasion to use some sugar in one of his experiments, and, being hurried, purchased it from the nearest corner grocery, paying more than the usual price. It proved to be badly adulterated, and the user has been more careful since in advising his poor friends about purchasing provisions. The credit system is the natural outcome of uncertain income, and for that reason is hard to avoid, but in a number of instances it is continued long after the necessity that caused the buyer to ask credit has ceased to exist.
Another and less excusable form of the credit system is buying household goods on the instalment plan. The poor are often teased into this by glib agents. An old woman, whose income was not sufficient to keep her alive, contracted to buy a clock on the instalment plan for $8.00 because she needed one when she {114} occasionally had a day's job of cleaning. When her visitor remonstrated that a dollar clock would have done quite as well, she replied triumphantly, ”Yes, but this one is only 25 cents a week!” When payments cannot be made, and the purchaser is threatened with the loss of the goods, it is possible to be too hasty in rus.h.i.+ng to the rescue. The Fifteenth Report of the Boston a.s.sociated Charities records such an experience. ”A family had purchased furniture upon the instalment plan, when the husband was suddenly deprived of his job. The furniture was about to be seized, when generous sympathizers came to the rescue, and redeemed the articles. Scarcely had the donors time to realize what a financial relief they had been able to give to the troubled family before the same bit of folly was repeated, and 'parlor furniture' was added to the inventory of goods and chattels to be paid for by the week.” [3] When instalment men threaten seizure, it is well to find out whether they are acting within the law. They have been known to take advantage of ignorant clients. But the system {115} itself is bad in that it encourages the purchase of unnecessary things, and at a great advance upon cash prices.
When the poor man would borrow, he is often exposed to the impositions of a cla.s.s of unscrupulous money lenders, who violate the laws against usury, but hope to escape punishment or loss through the ignorance of their customers. The pitiful part of it is that the self-respecting poor often fall into their traps. A family in pecuniary straits for the first time is naturally attracted by the specious advertis.e.m.e.nts of the chattel-mortgage companies, which offer to lend money on goods that the borrower keeps in his possession, and promise that all negotiations shall be strictly confidential. This seems an easy way out of present difficulties without loss of self-respect or any painful publicity.