scrambled for among the children, or who teach the poor the fatal
lesson that mendicancy or something hardly distinguishable from
mendicancy will bring greater gain than honest and continuous work.
There is the impulsive, uninquiring charity that makes the trade of the
skilful begging-letter writer a lucrative profession, and makes men and
women who are rich, benevolent and weak, the habitual prey of greedy
impostors. There is the old-established charity for ministering to
simple poverty which draws to its centre all the pauperism of the
neighbouring districts, depresses wages, and impoverishes the very
district or class it was intended to benefit. There are charities which
not only largely diminish the sufferings that are the natural
consequence and punishment of vice; but even make the lot of the
criminal and the vicious a better one than that of the hard-working
poor. There are overlapping charities dealing with the same department,
but kept up with lavish waste through the rivalry of different religious
denominations, or in the interests of the officials connected with them;
belated or superannuated charities formed to deal with circumstances or
sufferings that have in a large degree passed away--useless, or almost
useless, charities established to carry out some silly fad or to gratify
some silly vanity; sectarian charities intended to further ends which,
in the eyes of all but the members of one sect, are not only useless but
mischievous; charities that encourage thriftless marriages, or make it
easy for men to neglect obvious duties, or keep a semi-pauper population
stationary in employments and on a soil where they can never prosper, or
in other ways handicap, impede or divert the natural and healthy course
of industry. Illustrations of all these evils will occur to every
careful student of the subject. Unintelligent, thoughtless, purely
impulsive charity, and charity which is inspired by some other motive
than a real desire to relieve suffering, will constantly go wrong, but
every intelligent man can find without difficulty vast fields on which
the largest generosity may be expended with abundant fruit.

Hospitals and kindred institutions for alleviating great unavoidable
calamities, and giving the sick poor something of the same chances of
recovery as the rich, for the most part fall under this head. Money will
seldom be wasted which is spent in promoting kinds of knowledge,
enterprise or research that bring no