Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams

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The Citizen's Library of Economics, Politics, and
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*DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS*

By JANE ADDAMS, Head of "Hull House," Chicago; joint author of
"Philanthropy and Social Progress." (_Now ready._)

Miss Addams' Settlement Work is known to all who are interested in
social amelioration and municipal conditions. As the title of her book
shows, it will be occupied with the reciprocal relations of ethical
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*CUSTOM AND COMPETITION*

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Topics treated under Custom include the Rent of Land and Custom;
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Custom and Commerce.

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of the question, and the significance of subhuman competition is
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Distribution, and its treatment of the subject of price admirably
supplements the theoretical discussion in "Monopolies and Trusts."

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By CHARLES ZUEBLIN, B.D., Associate Professor of Sociology in the
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DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS

*THE CITIZEN'S LIBRARY OF ECONOMICS, POLITICS, AND
SOCIOLOGY.*

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*MONOPOLIES AND TRUSTS.*
BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D.

*THE ECONOMICS OF DISTRIBUTION.*
BY JOHN A. HOBSON.

*WORLD POLITICS.*
BY PAUL S. REINSCH, PH.D., LL.B.

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BY EDWARD D. JONES, PH.D.

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BY M.N. BAKER, PH.B.

*DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS.*
BY JANE ADDAMS.

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BY PAUL S. REINSCH, PH.D., LL.B.

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*CUSTOM AND COMPETITION.*
BY RICHARD T. ELY, PH.D., LL.D.

*MUNICIPAL SOCIOLOGY.*
BY CHARLES ZUEBLIN.

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DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS

BY

JANE ADDAMS
HULL-HOUSE, CHICAGO

_New York_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1902

Set up and electrotyped March, 1902. Reprinted
June, September, 1902.

Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

To: M.R.S.

PREFATORY NOTE

The following pages present the substance of a course of twelve lectures
on "Democracy and Social Ethics" which have been delivered at various
colleges and university extension centres.

In putting them into the form of a book, no attempt has been made to
change the somewhat informal style used in speaking. The "we" and "us"
which originally referred to the speaker and her audience are merely
extended to possible readers.

Acknowledgment for permission to reprint is extended to _The Atlantic
Monthly_, _The International Journal of Ethics_, _The American Journal
of Sociology_, and to _The Commons_.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER II
CHARITABLE EFFORT 13

CHAPTER III
FILIAL RELATIONS 71

CHAPTER IV
HOUSEHOLD ADJUSTMENT 102

CHAPTER V
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION 137

CHAPTER VI
EDUCATIONAL METHODS 178

CHAPTER VII
POLITICAL REFORM 221

INDEX 279

DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL ETHICS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but
another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of
every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life
becomes meaningless.

Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the
community almost automatic. It is as easy for most of us to keep from
stealing our dinners as it is to digest them, and there is quite as much
voluntary morality involved in one process as in the other. To steal
would be for us to fall sadly below the standard of habit and
expectation which makes virtue easy. In the same way we have been
carefully reared to a sense of family obligation, to be kindly and
considerate to the members of our own households, and to feel
responsible for their well-being. As the rules of conduct have become
established in regard to our self-development and our families, so they
have been in regard to limited circles of friends. If the fulfilment of
these claims were all that a righteous life required, the hunger and
thirst would be stilled for many good men and women, and the clew of
right living would lie easily in their hands.

But we all know that each generation has its own test, the
contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately
judge of its own moral achievements, and that it may not legitimately
use a previous and less vigorous test. The advanced test must indeed
include that which has already been attained; but if it includes no
more, we shall fail to go forward, thinking complacently that we have
"arrived" when in reality we have not yet started.

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to
pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands
social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

It is perhaps significant that a German critic has of late reminded us
that the one test which the most authoritative and dramatic portrayal of
the Day of Judgment offers, is the social test. The stern questions are
not in regard to personal and family relations, but did ye visit the
poor, the criminal, the sick, and did ye feed the hungry?

All about us are men and women who have become unhappy in regard to
their attitude toward the social order itself; toward the dreary round
of uninteresting work, the pleasures narrowed down to those of appetite,
the declining consciousness of brain power, and the lack of mental food
which characterizes the lot of the large proportion of their
fellow-citizens. These men and women have caught a moral challenge
raised by the exigencies of contemporaneous life; some are bewildered,
others who are denied the relief which sturdy action brings are even
seeking an escape, but all are increasingly anxious concerning their
actual relations to the basic organization of society.

The test which they would apply to their conduct is a social test. They
fail to be content with the fulfilment of their family and personal
obligations, and find themselves striving to respond to a new demand
involving a social obligation; they have become conscious of another
requirement, and the contribution they would make is toward a code of
social ethics. The conception of life which they hold has not yet
expressed itself in social changes or legal enactment, but rather in a
mental attitude of maladjustment, and in a sense of divergence between
their consciences and their conduct. They desire both a clearer
definition of the code of morality adapted to present day demands and a
part in its fulfilment, both a creed and a practice of social morality.
In the perplexity of this intricate situation at least one thing is
becoming clear: if the latter day moral ideal is in reality that of a
social morality, it is inevitable that those who desire it must be
brought in contact with the moral experiences of the many in order to
procure an adequate social motive.

These men and women have realized this and have disclosed the fact in
their eagerness for a wider acquaintance with and participation in the
life about them. They believe that experience gives the easy and
trustworthy impulse toward right action in the broad as well as in the
narrow relations. We may indeed imagine many of them saying: "Cast our
experiences in a larger mould if our lives are to be animated by the
larger social aims. We have met the obligations of our family life, not
because we had made resolutions to that end, but spontaneously, because
of a common fund of memories and affections, from which the obligation
naturally develops, and we see no other way in which to prepare
ourselves for the larger social duties." Such a demand is reasonable,
for by our daily experience we have discovered that we cannot
mechanically hold up a moral standard, then jump at it in rare moments
of exhilaration when we have the strength for it, but that even as the
ideal itself must be a rational development of life, so the strength to
attain it must be secured from interest in life itself. We slowly learn
that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may
come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from
selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of
Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all
men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and
equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well
as a test of faith.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by
travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common
road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size
of one another's burdens. To follow the path of social morality results
perforce in the temper if not the practice of the democratic spirit, for
it implies that diversified human experience and resultant sympathy
which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.

There are many indications that this conception of Democracy is growing
among us. We have come to have an enormous interest in human life as
such, accompanied by confidence in its essential soundness. We do not
believe that genuine experience can lead us astray any more than
scientific data can.

We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come
only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the
surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and
concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement. Indeed, it is a
consciousness of the illuminating and dynamic value of this wider and
more thorough human experience which explains in no small degree that
new curiosity regarding human life which has more of a moral basis than
an intellectual one.

The newspapers, in a frank reflection of popular demand, exhibit an
omniverous curiosity equally insistent upon the trivial and the
important. They are perhaps the most obvious manifestations of that
desire to know, that "What is this?" and "Why do you do that?" of the
child. The first dawn of the social consciousness takes this form, as
the dawning intelligence of the child takes the form of constant
question and insatiate curiosity.

Literature, too, portrays an equally absorbing though better adjusted
desire to know all kinds of life. The popular books are the novels,
dealing with life under all possible conditions, and they are widely
read not only because they are entertaining, but also because they in a
measure satisfy an unformulated belief that to see farther, to know all
sorts of men, in an indefinite way, is a preparation for better social
adjustment--for the remedying of social ills.

Doubtless one under the conviction of sin in regard to social ills finds
a vague consolation in reading about the lives of the poor, and derives
a sense of complicity in doing good. He likes to feel that he knows
about social wrongs even if he does not remedy them, and in a very
genuine sense there is a foundation for this belief.

Partly through this wide reading of human life, we find in ourselves a
new affinity for all men, which probably never existed in the world
before. Evil itself does not shock us as it once did, and we count only
that man merciful in whom we recognize an understanding of the criminal.
We have learned as common knowledge that much of the insensibility and
hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a
realization of the experiences of other people. Already there is a
conviction that we are under a moral obligation in choosing our
experiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimately
determine our understanding of life. We know instinctively that if we
grow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse
to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect,
we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the
scope of our ethics.

We can recall among the selfish people of our acquaintance at least one
common characteristic,--the conviction that they are different from
other men and women, that they need peculiar consideration because they
are more sensitive or more refined. Such people "refuse to be bound by
any relation save the personally luxurious ones of love and admiration,
or the identity of political opinion, or religious creed." We have
learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the
will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which
deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say
that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and
unprogressive issues.

We know, at last, that we can only discover truth by a rational and
democratic interest in life, and to give truth complete social
expression is the endeavor upon which we are entering. Thus the
identification with the common lot which is the essential idea of
Democracy becomes the source and expression of social ethics. It is as
though we thirsted to drink at the great wells of human experience,
because we knew that a daintier or less potent draught would not carry
us to the end of the journey, going forward as we must in the heat and
jostle of the crowd.

The six following chapters are studies of various types and groups who
are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance
of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct.
No attempt is made to reach a conclusion, nor to offer advice beyond the
assumption that the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy,
but the quite unlooked-for result of the studies would seem to indicate
that while the strain and perplexity of the situation is felt most
keenly by the educated and self-conscious members of the community, the
tentative and actual attempts at adjustment are largely coming through
those who are simpler and less analytical.

CHAPTER II

CHARITABLE EFFORT

All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy,
which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away
from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to
act upon them.

Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a
course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct,
which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing
moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the
strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon
another.

Probably there is no relation in life which our democracy is changing
more rapidly than the charitable relation--that relation which obtains
between benefactor and beneficiary; at the same time there is no point
of contact in our modern experience which reveals so clearly the lack of
that equality which democracy implies. We have reached the moment when
democracy has made such inroads upon this relationship, that the
complacency of the old-fashioned charitable man is gone forever; while,
at the same time, the very need and existence of charity, denies us the
consolation and freedom which democracy will at last give.

It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined,
and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based upon
convictions which we no longer hold. Thus our estimate of the effect of
environment and social conditions has doubtless shifted faster than our
methods of administrating charity have changed. Formerly when it was
believed that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness, and that
the prosperous man was the righteous man, charity was administered
harshly with a good conscience; for the charitable agent really blamed
the individual for his poverty, and the very fact of his own superior
prosperity gave him a certain consciousness of superior morality. We
have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have
ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect; while
it is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its possession
is by no means assumed to imply the possession of the highest moral
qualities. We have learned to judge men by their social virtues as well
as by their business capacity, by their devotion to intellectual and
disinterested aims, and by their public spirit, and we naturally resent
being obliged to judge poor people so solely upon the industrial side.
Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm. It is largely in this
modern tendency to judge all men by one democratic standard, while the
old charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of two standards, that
much of the difficulty adheres. We know that unceasing bodily toil
becomes wearing and brutalizing, and our position is totally untenable
if we judge large numbers of our fellows solely upon their success in
maintaining it.

The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little house
made untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is
no longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her
hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over
against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained
only through status.

The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are those
who have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be through
sickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitable
reasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, and
must be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charity
visitor, let us assume, is a young college woman, well-bred and
open-minded; when she visits the family assigned to her, she is often
embarrassed to find herself obliged to lay all the stress of her
teaching and advice upon the industrial virtues, and to treat the
members of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrial
system. She insists that they must work and be self-supporting, that the
most dangerous of all situations is idleness, that seeking one's own
pleasure, while ignoring claims and responsibilities, is the most
ignoble of actions. The members of her assigned family may have other
charms and virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of each
other, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the
industrial side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occurs
to the mind of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been made
tender by much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no right
to say these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted to
cope with actual conditions than those of her broken-down family.

The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrial
preaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues and
housewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed, and
our views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods, which
could be applied when our consciences were in line with them, but which
are daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into people who work
with their hands and those who do not. The charity visitor belonging to
the latter class is perplexed by recognitions and suggestions which the
situation forces upon her. Our democracy has taught us to apply our
moral teaching all around, and the moralist is rapidly becoming so
sensitive that when his life does not exemplify his ethical convictions,
he finds it difficult to preach.

Added to this is a consciousness, in the mind of the visitor, of a
genuine misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of her
charity, and by their neighbors. Let us take a neighborhood of poor
people, and test their ethical standards by those of the charity
visitor, who comes with the best desire in the world to help them out of
their distress. A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the
difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by
one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with
which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient. The
neighborhood mind is at once confronted not only by the difference of
method, but by an absolute clashing of two ethical standards.

A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is
sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly
relations. There is the greatest willingness to lend or borrow anything,
and all the residents of the given tenement know the most intimate
family affairs of all the others. The fact that the economic condition
of all alike is on a most precarious level makes the ready outflow of
sympathy and material assistance the most natural thing in the world.
There are numberless instances of self-sacrifice quite unknown in the
circles where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimate
knowledge of one's neighbors impossible. An Irish family in which the
man has lost his place, and the woman is struggling to eke out the
scanty savings by day's work, will take in the widow and her five
children who have been turned into the street, without a moment's
reflection upon the physical discomforts involved. The most maligned
landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to
lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to
share her supper. A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain to
find work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment was
secured at last. Upon investigation it transpired that a neighbor
further down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for the
family friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for her
non-appearance were demanded, "It broke me heart to leave the place, but
what could I do?" A woman whose husband was sent up to the city prison
for the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her child
found herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually sold
her supply of household furniture. She took refuge with a friend whom
she supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town. When
she arrived, however, she discovered that her friend's husband had been
out of work so long that they had been reduced to living in one room.
The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband was obliged
to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he did
uncomplainingly if not cheerfully. Fortunately it was summer, "and it
only rained one night." The writer could not discover from the young
mother that she had any special claim upon the "friend" beyond the fact
that they had formerly worked together in the same factory. The husband
she had never seen until the night of her arrival, when he at once went
forth in search of a midwife who would consent to come upon his promise
of future payment.

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