Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/119

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LOYALTY AND LIBERALITY.
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and speak first? The one who is most liberal, who knows that cordiality takes no more time than rudeness.

Want of liberality and excess of loyalty to one's surroundings introduces a comic aspect into charities. Rich people often prefer to employ a missionary to visit the poor, rather than to go themselves, because "such an one is more like the poor's own kind." The Associated Charities tries to leap the gulf of inequalities by saying, "Visitors and Visited." The gulf of difference is there; insight and liberality cannot merely span it, but fill it up. The poor are too proud to say they are poor; the rich, too anxious to escape any imputation of nouveau riche or aristocracy. A liberal spirit accepts classifications as outwardly true, and then, through sympathy, forgets them in action.

Housework and children are common ground for all women, politics and trade for all men. The poor are as interested in the