Many wish to do good; they long to repress crime; they wish to diminish human sorrow; the poor look to them for help. Ready are their hearts to pity and their hands to bestow an alms. But they do not give wisely. Like Howard, they are full of compassion; unlike him, they have no system, no principle of action, no wise mode of dealing with the criminal, the ignorant, and the poor. They give profusely; they do not give thoughtfully; the fruits of their deeds are therefore corrupt and full of evil.
Let us explain. To bestow money, soup, blankets, and Bibles, is an easy duty; plenty of people will come for them; the demand is always equal to the supply. Society abounds with mean, lazy, drunken persons who do not wish to sweat and toil. There are men redolent of strong drink, tobacco, and filth, who “take the liberty of waiting upon your honor” to narrate tales of woe. They cannot get work; they owe five weeks rent; their wives are ill; their children have no bread. They are “poor fellows who wouldn’t come, but hunger is a sharp thorn,” and so on. There are women who knock at the door, and send in little, cramped, flattering, lying notes. Their husbands are in the hospital; they are going to be confined of their sixth child; they have four children ill of the small-pox; they have nothing to eat; they smell of whiskey, but that is of no consequence. A leetle drop they say, is a comfort, and they don’t get drunk.
There are little girls who call upon us to say that their father fell from a scaffold, and greatly needs some money to get him a morsel of fresh meat—the said father being then waiting round the corner for the anticipated gift. There are boys who follow us from square to square with a wretched whine, and telling a score of details about their daily sufferings, but taking care not to whisper a word of the short pipe, the smoking pudding, the pot of ale, and the visit to the Circus or Theatre, with which they solace themselves after the public labors and sufferings of the day. And there are the dramatic beggars—men who crouch behind a scroll, on which is written STARVATION; the pathetic beggars—women who sit on door-steps, with cold tears rolling down their cheeks; the rural beggars—picturesque beggars—and all other kinds of beggars.
Who is to be held responsible for this army of beggars? To a large extent, (we reply) careless alms-givers. People who give to any and to all that ask, create pauperism. They bribe the feeble and the wicked to adopt the disgraceful profession of a mendicant. In saying this we do not depreciate, nor do we seek to hinder that charity which God loveth. To bestow an alms is often a duty; when well bestowed it is pleasing to God. Not so with almsgiving as it is. That is a moral blight; it has produced a generation of liars, thieves, drunkards, and prostitutes; it is a demon in the garb of an angel; idleness, falsehood, dirt, ignorance, and crime, are its foul results.
We appeal to facts and witnesses. Mendicants, paupers, and thieves abound; they are of all nations. We have them from Ireland, from Africa, from India, and from amongst ourselves. They are of all ages; old and young, parents and children come before us. They are of all kinds; some in silk, some in broad-cloth, some in fustian, and some in rags. Their sores are artificial; their tales are got up; their lives are most unholy shams.
The evil influence of indiscriminate almsgiving is not confined to our own country. The continent is also the sphere of their operations.
“It happened that on two occasions, (says Fraser’s Magazine,) at the interval of about eighteen months, we travelled from Paris to Boulogne, and stopped for a few minutes at a village on the road, of which we have now forgotten the name. An Englishwoman, in an agony of supplication, and with her cheeks wet with tears, rushed to the window of the diligence, and inquired whether there was any Englishman inside. We owned the soft impeachment, when, with an earnestness of manner which would have done honor to an accomplished actress, she stated that her husband, a week before, had broken his leg, and was now lying dangerously ill in the village. Of course, it was impossible to verify her statement, but, we confess to our shame, that we received it without hesitation, and dropped into her hand a five-franc piece. At the same town, eighteen months afterwards, the same woman, with the self-same story, appeared at the window with the old inquiry. We threw ourselves forward with the sudden impulse of surprise; the trickstress recognised us, and fled in confusion.”
Time would fail us in attempting a complete exposition of the manifold evils of this system, and we will therefore confine ourselves to its influence on the education of destitute children. Now it is plain that whatever depraves the parent injures the child. Make the parents indolent, false, and drunken by reckless benevolence, or by anything else, and you peril the future welfare of their offspring. What do they care about the ignorance, the rags, and filthy aspect of their little ones? Ignorance will excite compassion—rags will induce all kind people to bestow shoes, linen, bonnets, and gowns. Dirt draws money—vermin bear interest. These—brutish ignorance, fluttering rags, uncombed hair, shoeless feet, an unwashed body, a dramatic cast of the eye, and a voice carefully attuned to utter the true whine—“wot tells upon old gemmen and wimmen,” are the stock-in-trade and fixtures of the mendicant; take these away, and you rob him of his capital. What does he or his children want with Ragged Schools? They would bring him no money by going there, therefore he will not send them.
In all such cases as these, and in a thousand more, the children, though awfully ignorant, are wilfully kept from school. They make money; they bring beef to the pot, tobacco to the pipe, cards to the fingers, and rum to the lips. Send them to church! Not so. “Sunday is our best day.” Send them to school! “We cannot afford that,” said a father. “How much will you pay us?” said a drunken mother. Send them to work! “Bedad! we knows better than that!” said a son of ——, we shall not say where. Nay, so profitable is begging that children are hired for the purpose. Hence, the difficulty which many a missionary experiences when he tries to get the right sort of children for the Ragged or Mission School.
“A spirit-dealer in High street informs me that he draws £10 more on the pay days of the Glasgow poor than on any other days of the week. Another spirit-dealer says that the paupers regularly come to him and spend in drink what they receive. I asked him how he knew they were paupers? He replied, that they made no secret of it; he heard them talk about what they got, and how long they had to wait for it. They go in hundreds from the long closes in High street. An inspector informs me, that he observed a lame pauper, not two hours after he had received 8s., carried to the police office drunk on a barrow. He also found a pauper, aged eighty years, so drunk that she was not able to rise from her chair, and singing, ‘The world is bound to maintain me, sing yo, sing yo, sing yo,’ to some other jovial paupers who joined in her revels. He frequently finds paupers drunk on their beds after they have received their aliment; and having spent all in a single night, they live in a starving condition, or beg, or steal, until next pay-day comes round.... Widows, left with children under ten years of age, receive a great deal of out-door relief from this Board, to bring them up. A large proportion of these are dissipated characters, who drink the money which is intended for the benefit of their children, whom they send out to beg, and thus grow up uneducated, and become, if they survive the bad treatment to which they are subjected, pests to society, like their mothers.”