Who will be frugal and
provident, when charity offers all that frugality and providence can
confer? Does not the gift of the advantages, comforts, and rewards of
industry, without the necessity of labouring for them, tend to sap the
very foundations of energy and self-reliance? Is not the circumstance
that poverty is the only requisite qualification on the part of the
applicant for charity, calculated to tempt the people to
self-indulgence, to dissipation, and to those courses of life which keep
them poor?
Men who will not struggle and exert themselves, are those who are helped
first. The worst sort of persons are made comfortable: whilst the
hard-working, self-supporting man, who disdains to throw himself upon
charity, is compelled to pay rates for the maintenance of the idle.
Charity stretches forth its hand to the rottenest parts of society; it
rarely seeks out, or helps, the struggling and the honest. As Carlyle
has said, "O my astonishing benevolent friends! that never think of
meddling with the material while it continues sound; that stress and
strain it with new rates and assessments, till even it has given way and
declared itself rotten; whereupon you greedily snatch at it, and say,
'Now let us try to do some good upon it!'"
The charity which merely consists in giving, is an idle
indulgence--often an idle vice.
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