724 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and which I helieve to be in so many aspects of it so grave a menace 

 to our higliest welfare, did not exist, because it had no need to 

 exist. The ordinary American community, East or West, had, as 

 distinguishing it, however small its numbers and narrow its means, 

 two characteristics which our modern systems of institutional char- 

 ity are widely conspiring to extinguish and destroy. One of these 

 was that resolute endurance of straitness and poverty of which there 

 is so fine and true a portraiture in Miss Wilkins's remarkable story 

 Jerome. I venture to say that the charm of that rare book, to a 

 great many of the most intelligent and appreciative of its readers, 

 lay in th^ fact that they could match it, or something like it, in 

 their own experience; that they had known silent and proud women, 

 and brave and proud boys, to whom, whatever the hard pinch of 

 want that they knew, to accept a dole was like accepting a blow, 

 and who covered their poverty alike from the eye of inquisitive 

 stranger or kin with a robe of secrecy that was at once impene- 

 trable and all-concealing. Life to them was a battle, and they 

 could lose it, as heroes have lost it on the tented field, without a 

 murmur; but to sue for bread to some other, even if that other 

 were of the same blood, would have smitten them as with the stain 

 of personal dishonor. 



And over against such, in the days and among the communities 

 of which 1 sy)eak, were those whose gift and ministry it was — with- 

 out an intrusive curiosity, without a vulgar ostentation, without 

 a word or look that implied that they guessed the sore need to 

 which they reached out— yet somehow to discover it, to succor it, 

 and then to help, finest and rarest of all, to hide it. 



Now, then, behind such a condition of things there was a sure 

 and wise discernment, even if it was only instinctive, of a profound 

 moral truth, which was this: that you can not help me, nor I you, 

 without risk. For the most sacred thing in either of us is our man- 

 hood or womanhood — that thing which differentiates us from any 

 mere mechanism, that thing in us which says, I can, I ought, I will. 

 Take that out of human nature and what is left is not worth con- 

 sidering, save as one might consider any other clever mechanism. 

 But the power to choose, the power to act, and the consciousness 

 that choice and action are to be dominated by something that an- 

 swers to the instinct of loyalty to God, to self-respect, to the ideals 

 of honor and righteousness — that is what makes life worth living, 

 and any conceivable thing worth seeking or doing. Now, the mo- 

 ment that the question of our mutual relations enters we have to 

 be concerned with the way in which they will act on this power, 

 quality, characteristic — call it what you will — that makes manhood. 

 It is not enough, for example, that my impulse to give you a pint 



