Excerpt from The Charity Visitor: A Handbook for Beginners
The professional visitor or apprentice will have henceforth the help of an experienced guide, of a woman who combines tact, sympathy, intelligence, unwearied devotion and a vision of a better social order where few or none will be compelled to be "familiar with the bread by which men die." These directions have been tested by numerous social workers and they are clearly stated in logical order. Fortunately many volunteer visitors are coming to our help, and they would do well to ponder these weighty suggestions and to read the publications recommended as a preparation for a task that seems easy only to the tyro. It is a pity to grope aimlessly where heartstrings are sensitive and to wound those one sincerely seeks to aid and to comfort. All "good fellows" may here find directions by one who knows.
There are critics of case records who imagine they have said something when they mock at "red tape." People who sneer at bookkeeping swell the ranks of bankrupts. Business men and physicians know well that accounts are indispensable.
Long experience in charity makes us all impatient to see the day when charitable relief, with all its humiliations and harrowing uncertainties, will be no longer needed, when a fairer distribution of income, a complete system of social hygiene, education and insurance will reduce dependence to a vanishing point; and the hope of promoting that purpose is the chief inspiration of contemporary charity. We know that these tragic case records and the statistics which are gathered from them must quicken the public conscience and lead to nobler methods. Meantime, in spite of cheap and ill-advised jeers at means of relief which are confessedly only mitigation and not final cure, we cannot refuse to help diminish distress so far as possible. Talk of Utopias in some future state, here or hereafter, comes with poor grace from those who totally neglect the miserable victims of personal fault and of social misrule. It is not fair to say that all charity is mere opium taken to relieve the remorse of willing exploiters. As Miss Sears well says, the direct use of these pathetic histories is to improve our methods of immediate relief, but our ultimate and larger purpose is to "accumulate data concerning poverty, disease, social exploitation and industrial abuse - data that may prove effective in securing a wider knowledge and hence the amelioration of the conditions, social, industrial and economic, that produce dependency."
It is well to remind ourselves in this connection that our district committees represent only an elementary stage of development.
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