all her parks to wheat next year?

3d Count. Ask her to take on the thirty families, who were just
going to tramp off those three hundred acres into the Rhine-land, if
she had not kept them in both senses this winter, and left them on
my hands--once beggars, always beggars.

C. Hugo. Well, I'm a practical man, and I say, the sharper the
famine, the higher are prices, and the higher I sell, the more I can
spend; so the money circulates, Sir, that's the word--like water--
sure to run downwards again; and so it's as broad as it's long; and
here's a health--if there was any beer--to the farmers' friends, 'A
bloody war and a wet harvest.'

Abbot. Strongly put, though correctly. For the self-interest of
each it is which produces in the aggregate the happy equilibrium of
all.

C. Wal. Well--the world is right well made, that's certain; and He
who made the Jews' sin our salvation may bring plenty out of famine,
and comfort out of covetousness. But look you, Sirs, private
selfishness may be public weal, and yet private selfishness be just
as surely damned, for all that.

3d Count. I hold, Sir, that every alms is a fresh badge of slavery.

C. Wal. I don't deny it.

3d Count. Then teach them independence.

C. Wal. How? By tempting them to turn thieves, when begging fails?
By keeping their stomachs just at desperation-point? By starving
them out here, to march off, starving all the way, to some town, in
search of employment, of which, if they find it, they know no more
than my horse? Likely! No, Sir, to make men of them, put them not
out of the reach, but out of the need, of charity.

3d Count. And how, prithee? By teaching them, like our fair
Landgravine, to open their mouth for all that drops? Thuringia is
become a kennel of beggars in her hands.

C. Wal. In hers? In ours, Sir!

Abbot. Idleness, Sir, deceit, and immorality, are the three
children of this same barbarous self-indulgence in almsgiving.
Leave the poor alone. Let want teach them the need of self-
exertion, and misery prove the foolishness of crime.

C. Wal. How? Teach them to become men by leaving them brutes?

Abbot. Oh, Sir, there we step in, with the consolations and
instructions of the faith.

C. Wal. Ay, but while the grass is growing the steed is starving;
and in the meantime, how will the callow chick Grace stand against
the tough old game-cock Hunger?

3d Count. Then how, in the name of patience, would you have us