Let me illustrate this tendency to forget the common laws of personal integrity by allusion to a novel which comes from another college-settlement source. It is a story called, I think, _The Burden of Christopher_, published three or four years ago,--a clever book withal and rather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from his university, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued with college-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordance with the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed by competitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in his hands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of his factory and the consequent distress of his people, he appropriates this trust money for his business. In the end he fails, the crash comes, and, as I recollect it, he commits suicide. All well and good; but in a paragraph toward the end of the book, indeed by the whole trend of the story, we discover that the humanitarian sympathy which led the hero to sacrifice his individual integrity for the weal of his work-people is a higher law in the author's estimation than the old moral sense which would have made his personal integrity of the first importance to himself and to the world.
I submit to you, my dear reviewer, that such notions are subversive of right thinking and are in fact the poisonous fruit of an era which has relaxed its hold on any ideal outside of material well-being. For that reason when I read in Miss Addams's book such words as these, "Evil does not shock us as it once did," I am filled with anger. I wonder at the blindness of the age when I read further such a perversion of truth as this: "We have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect."--Have we?
I am troubled lest the letter I wrote yesterday should have seemed to breathe more of personal bitterness than of philosophic judgment. Did I make clear that my hostility to modern humanitarianism is not due to any contempt for charity or for the desire of universal justice? I dislike and distrust it for its false emphasis and for its perversion of morality--and the two faults are practically one.