All this is difficult to make clear, and it is chiefly for this reason that I have repeatedly insisted that the financial approach, the financial ground for an _entente cordiale_, should not be used early in our dealings with the sufferer, but should if possible be postponed until, through medical service and personal intimacy, something approaching true friendship has been established. It should be clear from what I have said that our judgments about giving financial aid can be sound, can result in doing good without harm or (as in surgery) good with a small element of harm, only in case they are the fruit of detailed, prolonged, individual study. It cannot be a wholesale matter. It cannot be done in exactly the same way in the case of any two individuals. Let us stop to realize for a moment how arduous, how bold a task we have undertaken. We hope to construct a person's economic future better than he can construct it himself. We hope to see what the individual himself, despite the vividness and pressure of his immediate need, has not been able to see for himself--namely, how he can get himself out of his financial difficulties. We who do not wear the shoe are venturing to say where it pinches and how the pressure may be relieved, and to know about this better than the sufferer who feels the pressure in his own person and longs for its relief as it is hardly possible for any one else to desire it. It is almost as if we were trying to use his mind for him. It must not be that. But if it is not to be that, we must be sure that our aid is given through stimulating the individual to think for himself. "What do you think," we must constantly be asking him, "is the best way out of this our difficulty?" He must feel that we know it to be _our_ difficulty as well as his, that we are not looking on with the cold gaze of an outsider, that we suffer in his suffering, and still that it is at last his, and that with all our best efforts we can only contribute a little to what must be for the most part his own reconstruction, a reconstruction like that which the body performs when it heals a wound which the surgeon or the physician can only encourage a little towards its natural healing.