IX.
I wish, sometimes, that they would not say they were going to send the money back; but I wish this rather for their sake than for mine. I am pretty well inured to the disappointment sure to follow; but I am afraid that the poor pretense demoralizes them, and, above all, I do not wish to demoralize them by my connivance. Once, when I was a visitor for the Associated Charities in Boston, the question came up in the weekly meeting whether, if one gave money when there was no hope of getting work, one ought to let the beneficiary suppose that one expected to get it back. Ought one to say that he was making his gift a loan? Would it not be better to treat it frankly as a gift? A man to whose goodness I mentally uncover said he had given that point some thought, and he believed one ought not to pretend that it was a loan when it was not; but one might fitly say, “I let you have this money. If you are ever able to give it back, I shall be glad to have you do so.” It seems to me that this is the wisest possible word on the subject.
Of course the reason why we have such a bad conscience in giving is that we feel we ought not to pauperize people. Perhaps this is one reason why we give so little to obvious destitution. I am this moment just in from the street, where I gave alms to a one-armed tatterdemalion, with something of this obscure struggle in my mind. As I came up with him, well fenced against the bitter wind that blew through his ruins, I foresaw that I should give him something, and I took from my outside pocket all the change there was in it—three coppers, a nickel, and a piece of twenty-five. I was ashamed to give the coppers, and I felt that a good citizen ought not to give a quarter for fear of pauperizing a man who had already nothing in the world, and no hopeful appearance of being able to get anything. So I gave him the nickel, and I am not quite easy in my mind about it.
Perhaps I was remotely influenced not to give a quarter to this one-armed man by the behavior of another one-armed man whom I befriended. I did give him a quarter, not from a good impulse, but because I had no smaller change, and it was that or nothing. The gift seemed to astound him. It was in a shoe-store, where I had only one boot on, in the process of trying a pair, and I was quite helpless against him when he burst into blessings of Irish picturesqueness, and asked my name, apparently that he might pray for me without making a mistake in the address; and when I said, from a natural bashfulness, or a mean fear that he might find me out at home and come again to beg of me, that I would take the chance of the answer of his prayers getting to me, he told me all about the railroad accident that lost him his arm; and not content with this, he took his poor stump—as if to prove that it was real—and rubbed it over me, and blessed me and blessed me again, till I was quite ashamed of getting so much more than my money’s worth. Shall I own that I began to fear this grateful man was not entirely sober?