ons, remember, at far greater cost than if they were busy. Do you
think a vicious person eats less than an honest one? or that it is
cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man sober? There is, I
suppose, a dim idea in the mind of the public, that they don't pay for
the maintenance of people they don't employ. Those staggering rascals
at the street corner, grouped around its splendid angle of public-house,
we fancy that they are no servants of ours! that we pay them no wages!
that no cash out of our pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter!

Whose cash is it then they are spending? It is not got honestly by work.
You know that much. Where do they get it from? Who has paid for their
dinner and their pot? Those fellows can only live in one of two ways--by
pillage or beggary. Their annual income by thieving comes out of the
public pocket, you will admit. They are not cheaply fed, so far as they
are fed by theft. But the rest of their living--all that they don't
steal--they must beg. Not with success from you, you think. Wise, as
benevolent, you never gave a penny in "indiscriminate charity." Well,
I congratulate you on the freedom of your conscience from that sin, mine
being bitterly burdened with the memory of many a sixpence given to
beggars of whom I knew nothing but that they had pale faces and thin
waists. But it is not that kind of street beggary that is the worst
beggars' trade. Home alms which it is their worst degradation to
receive. Those scamps know well enough that you and your wisdom are
worth nothing to them. They won't beg of you. They will beg of their
sisters, and mothers, and wives, and children, and of any one else who is
enough ashamed of being of the same blood with them to pay to keep them
out of sight. Every one of those blackguards is the bane of a family.
That is the deadly "indiscriminate charity"--the charity which each
household pays to maintain its own private curse.

133. And you think that is no affair of yours? and that every family
ought to watch over and subdue its own living plague? Put it to
yourselves this way, then: suppose you knew every one of those families
kept an idol in an inner room--a big-bellied bronze figure, to which
daily sacrifice and oblation was made; at whose feet so much beer and
brandy was poured out every morning on the ground; and before which,
every night, good meat, enough for two men's keep, was set, and left,
till it was putrid,