WISDOM IN CHARITY. 5
free movement of our people unsettles the stability of thousands
of families and wastes their small resources, while they vainly
strive to better their condition by change; business is often a
lottery in which the hopeful investor draws a blank; and the
successful gains of a minority leave a larger minority to encamp
on the narrow, ragged edge between competence and want.
Worst of all, our grand attempt to raise high the standard of
intelligence, by education through books alone, results in bring-
ing forward hundreds of thousands of young men and women,
with fine and dainty aspirations, but with neither training nor
taste for productive industry. They marry, found families and
pay the bills with drafts on the bank of hope. Couple this with
the expensiveness of modern life, growing out of the great in-
crease of artificial wants, and it may appear that the plea of
want of employment often means that many men and women
cannot find just such work as they would like to do, at just
such wages as they would like to command.
Now to this hungry and growing multitude it will never do
for society to say, either through its public laws or its private
Charities, “The world owes you the living you covet, and you
shall be maintained in idleness till your dreams come true.”
What then? Shall we adopt the motto, “Every one for him-
self, and the devil take the hindmost?” Then he would surely
catch us all ! We cannot innocently be indifferent to any form
of suffering, however caused. Shall we make every poor-house
a workhouse, and drive all the needy to the overseers? The
remedy for all this misery is not in indiscriminate harshness
and pitiless severity. Every poor-house and asylum ought in-
deed to be in part a work-house; but society would be brutal-
ized, along with its victims, if the delicate duties of humanity
were discharged only through political functionaries as now se-
lected.
For a time, while population was thin, Charity might safely
be left as a duty between neighbors; but with the growth of
cities, who knows, or can know, the people of his own street,
to say nothing of the swarming myriads? And who can find
time or means to deal with the hapless wanderers, or with the
human rats the infest the crowded and sickly alleys 2 Y, t
Something must be done, or we all sink together. An ever-in-
creasing deposit of misery and vice, disorder and desperation,