194 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
One great manufacturing firm built for its operatives a sort of palace of delight ; but the founders were bitterly disappointed in its results, until, years after, putting aside their own precon- ceptions as to the way in which the pleasures and opportunities they offered should be used, they gave rein to the wishes of the behold ! a multitude of wants, worthy wants, cropped out of which the originators had never dreamed. Now, the palace is really a delight. Another practical philanthropist and merchant prince who has fitted up a home on a grand scale for his employes and has tried profit sharing to some extent, finds the home regarded askance and avoided, and the profits discount ir ahead in costlier raiment or self indulgence.
But in neither home nor store were the workers ever allowed to feel the slightest sense of ownership. Even Toynbee Hall, the socialists declare, is a failure. The university men, they claim, went to East London "to teach the poor a thing or two;" the poor, on the contrary, have taught the young men a thing or two, with result that the college reformers are becoming socialists. To make availing these and kindred efforts for the relief of suffering mankind, to deal wisely and in a practical way with the arbitrarily called "lower classes," it behooves us, first, to aban- don our Procrustean endeavor to fit workers to our ideas as to what ethical ambitions are proper for industrial communities to cherish. Surroundings that satisfied toilers a generation ago suffice no longer. Distinctions then admitted are now resented. Standards of living are higher. Social aspirations quicken in the breast of the lowliest healthy outcome of the democratic germ. In theory, comparative riches are easily enough provided for gaunt sewing women and weary clerks, at domestic service ; but as they hate it and are unfitted for it, out-at-elbow "young ladies" throng the factories, while the comfortably appointed kitchens of the rich remain a solitude. To argue, to inveigh is useless, until some of the present requirements of household ice are changed separation from one's family, for instance, and until public sentiment so annihilates inequalities of station that young men with a social career before them will not be
