In private life the neglect of a domestic hearth for the vainglorious squandering abroad of the means that could and ought to render that the chief seat of comfort and independence, calls down upon the thoughtless and heartless squanderer and abuser of his means the just indignation and merited contempt of every thinking and properly constituted mind. The “Charity” that does not begin at home is the worst species of unjustifiable prodigality, and the first step to the absolute ruin of the “nearest and dearest” for the sake of the profligate and abandoned. And no sophistry can justify the apparent liberality that deprives others of their just and urgent dues.
It may be and is most noble to feed the widow and to clothe the orphan; but where is the beneficence of the deed if the wife and children of the ostentatious donor—the victims of the performance of such acts—are left themselves to endure misery and privations, from which his inadequate means cannot exempt the stranger and the giver’s own household!
The sparrow who unwittingly rears the cuckoo’s spurious offspring, tending with care the ultimate destroyer of its own young, does so in perfect ignorance of the results about to follow the misplaced affection. The cravings of the interloper are satisfied to the detriment of its own offspring; and when the full-fledged recipient of its misplaced bounty no longer needs its aid, the thankless stranger wings its way on its far-off course, selfishly careless of the fostering bird that brought it into life; and this may be looked upon as one of the results generally attendant upon a blind forgetfulness of where our first endeavours for the amelioration of the wants of others should be made.
It has ever been the crying sin of the vastly sympathetic to weep for the miseries of the distant, and blink at the wretchedness their eyes—if not their hearts—must ache to see. Their charity must have its proper stage, their sentiments the proper objects,—and their imaginations the undisturbed right to revel in the supposititious grievances of the far-off wretched and oppressed. The poor black man! the tortured slave! the benighted infidel! the debased image of his maker! the sunken bondsman! These terms must be the “Open sesame” for the breasts from whence spring bibles, bribes, blankets, glass beads, pocket-combs, tracts, teachers, missions, and missionaries. Oppression is what they would put down; but then the oppression must be of “foreign manufacture.” Your English, genuine home-made article, though as superior in strength and endurance as our own canvas is to the finest fold of gauze-like cambric, is in their opinion a thing not worth a thought. A half oppressed Caffre is an object of ten thousand times more sympathy than a wholly oppressed Englishman; a half-starved Pole the more fitting recipient of the same proportion of actual bounty to a wholly starving peasant of our own land of law and liberty.
Let one-tenth the disgusting details so nobly exposed in the Times newspaper, as to the frightful state of some of our legalised poor law inquisitions, appear as extracts from the columns of a foreign journal, stating such treatment to exist amongst a foreign population, and mark the result. Why, the town would teem with meetings and the papers with speeches. Royal, noble, and honourable chairmen and vice chairmen would launch out their just anathemas against the heartless despots whose realms were disgraced by such atrocities. Think, think of the aged poor torn from their kindred, caged in a prison, refused all aid within, debarred from every hope without,—think of the flesh, the very flesh, rotting by slow degrees, and then in putrid masses falling from their wretched bones: think, we say, on this—then give what name you can, save murder, to their quickly succeeding death.
Fancy children—children that should be in their prime—so caged and fed that the result is disease in its most loathsome form, and with all its most appalling consequences! No hope! no flight! The yet untainted, as it were, chained to the spot, with mute despair watching the slow infection, and with breaking hearts awaiting the hour—the moment—when it must reach to them!
We say, think of these things—not as if they were the doings in England, and therefore legalised matters of course—but think of them as the arts of some despot in a far-off colony, and oh, how all hearts would burn—all tongues curse and call for vengeance on the abetors of such atrocities!
The supporters of the rights of man would indeed pour forth their eloquent denunciations against the oppressors of the absent. The poetry of passion would be exhausted to depict the frightful state of the crimeless and venerable victim of tyranny, bowing his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave; while the wailing of the helpless innocents different indeed in colour, but in heart and spirit like ourselves, being sprung from the one great source, would echo throughout the land, and find responses in every bosom not lost to the kindly feelings of good-will towards its fellows! Had the would-be esteemed philanthropists but these “foreign cues for passion,” they would indeed
“Drown the stage with tears,
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech;