If this were not so, if misery were inevitable, then
there would be no justification for the new view of
charity. If it is justified, it carries us irresistibly be-
yond the remedial agencies, beautiful and healing
though they may be, to the consideration of the causes
which bring them their tasks.

Although misery is our theme rather than poverty,
or dependence, or pauperism, yet it is obvious that
these are causes of misery that lie beyond the bound-
aries of this inquiry. Remorse over some past mis-
conduct, the total failure of some high ambition, dis-
appointment in love, the loneliness which comes from
the inability to make friends, the silent anguish of a
parent's broken heart, and a vast number of other
such experiences which are familiar enough, do not
readily lend themselves to social investigation or to
conscious remedial social endeavor. There is, how-
ever, no sharp line between such mental anguish as
lies in these experiences and that which is directly
traceable to preventable disease and accident, to loss
of employment and a low standard of living, to in-
temperance and vice and crime, to ignorance and
inefficiency, and to the other well-recognized causes of
dependence and misery among the poor.

We are to consider, then, not all misery, but such
misery as gives external, objective indication of its

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