that the necessaries of life must be provided for everyone who is in need of them, without regard to the causes of that need. In the first place, voluntary charity has this to commend it—that it is contributed by those who can best afford it, and that in most cases, at all events, its motive force is sympathy and goodwill. State relief, on the other hand, is enforced by the blunt methods of the broker's man, and is often exacted from people who are poor themselves, and the fact of compulsion robs it of its virtue. We know that the quality of mercy is not strained, and we are told that it drops "like the gentle dew from heaven." The rates, on the other hand, are forced out under strong pressure, and so far from dropping they have an invariable tendency to rise. Then, again, we may ask whether the resuscitated doctrines of the French Revolution, which form the chief stock-in-trade of the more advanced advocates of State relief, will bear examination from an ethical point of view; whether, quite apart from the question of pauperisation, they are having a wholesome effect upon those whom they propose to benefit; or whether, in fact, they are exciting in them most of the passions prohibited by the Decalogue and by Christian teaching. William Cobbett ("Rural Rides," p. 201) says: "Poverty at its worst gives no man a right to view his neighbour with an evil eye, much less to do him a mischief." He was one of the first of the social reformers. From his successors we hear no such sentiments. It is time that we should "clear our minds from cant" upon these questions. Many doctrines of the grossest materialism, and which, one is tempted to add, are purely predatory, are now put forward in the name of Christ by people who frankly tell us that they have no belief in the divinity of Christ, and who perhaps in the same breath are heaping curses upon Christian charity. A French writer of many years ago, replying to similar controversialists, says: "Should we, for the rest, take seriously the admiration that the writers on this side profess for Christianity, or accept the quotations that they borrow from it, as
