These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions,
charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they
cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived.
They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk.
They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End
as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of
Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of
social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an
infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data
which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively
collected, they have achieved nothing.
As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off
their backs. The very money they dribble out in their child's schemes
has been wrung from the poor. They come from a race of successful and
predatory bipeds who stand between the worker and his wages, and they try
to tell the worker what he shall do with the pitiful balance left to him.
Of what use, in the name of God, is it to establish nurseries for women
workers, in which, for instance, a child is taken while the mother makes
violets in Islington at three farthings a gross, when more children and
violet-makers than they can cope with are being born right along? This
violet-maker handles each flower four times, 576 handlings for three
farthings, and in the day she handles the flowers 6912 times for a wage
of ninepence.
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