2. That the poor, by industry, prudence, and economy, may at all times support themselves comfortably, without depending on eleemosynary aid—and, as a corollary from these positions,
3. That their sufferings and distresses chiefly, if not wholly, arise from their idleness, their dissipation, and their extravagance.
4. That taxes for the support of the poor, and aid afforded them by charitable individuals, or benevolent societies, are pernicious, as, by encouraging the poor to depend on them, they foster their idleness and improvidence, and thus produce, or at least increase, the poverty and distress they are intended to relieve.
These opinions, so far as they have operated—and, through the mischievous zeal and industry of the school of political economists by which they have been promulgated, they have spread widely—have been pernicious to the rich and the poor. They tend to harden the hearts of the former against the sufferings and distresses of the latter,—and of course prolong those sufferings and distresses.
"Posterity will scarcely credit the extent to which the popular feeling has been worked upon and warped by the ravings of some of our modern economists. They, truly, have done all that in them lay, to extinguish in the bosoms of the more opulent classes, every spark of generous and benevolent feeling towards the destitute and needy pauper. In their eyes, pauperism is a crime, for which nothing short of absolute starvation can form an adequate punishment."—London Quarterly Review, July, 1828.
Many wealthy individuals, benevolent and liberal, apprehensive lest by charitable aid to persons in distress, they might produce evil to society, are, by these pernicious and cold-blooded doctrines, prevented from indulging the feelings of their hearts, and employing a portion of their superfluous wealth for the best purpose to which it can be appropriated—that purpose which, at the hour of death, will afford the most solid comfort on retrospection—that is, "to feed the hungry; to give drink to the thirsty; to clothe the naked; to comfort the comfortless."[1] The economists in question, when they are implored by the starving poor for "bread," tender them "a stone." To the unfeeling and uncharitable of the rich (and such unhappily there are), these doctrines afford a plausible pretext, of which they are not slow to avail themselves, for withholding their aid from the poor. They have moreover tended to attach a sort of disrepute to those admirable associations of ladies and gentlemen, for the relief of the poor, on which Heaven looks down with complacence, and which form a delightful oasis in the midst of the arid deserts of sordid selfishness which on all sides present themselves to the afflicted view of the contemplative observer.
In entering on this discussion, it is necessary to consider the character and conduct of the classes whose case I have undertaken to review. Both are, I am persuaded, greatly and perniciously mistaken.
There is scarcely any propensity more universal among mankind, than the tendency to generalize from inadequate premises. From the good or the bad qualities of half a dozen persons or things, most people are disposed to draw general conclusions affecting the whole species or genus to which the half dozen belong. It is not therefore wonderful, although greatly to be regretted, that on beholding a number of worthless poor, so many superficial
- ↑ How transcendently superior are those who, like Mr. Perkins and Mr. Philips of Boston, Mr. Brown of Rhode Island, Mr. Oliver of Baltimore, Mr. Rutgers of New York, Mr. Ralston, Mr. Henry, and Mrs. Stott of Philadelphia, &c., bestow thousands and tens of thousands on public charities or other benevolent objects, to those who retain their millions to the last moment of their existence! Ten thousand dollars bestowed during life have more real merit than a million bequeathed at the last gasp, when it can be no longer clutched.
