rome; but who
can say that he is not charitable?

* * * * *

I lay stress on this matter of charity because essentially the
charitable man is the good man. And by good we mean one who is of value
to others as contrasted with one who is working, as most of us are, only
for his own pocket all the time. He is the man who is such an egoist
that he looks on himself as a part of the whole world and a brother to
the rest of mankind. He has really got an exaggerated ego and everybody
else profits by it in consequence.

He believes in abstract principles of virtue and would die for them; he
recognizes duties and will struggle along, until he is a worn-out,
penniless old man, to perform them. He goes out searching for those who
need help and takes a chance on their not being deserving. Many a poor
chap has died miserably because some rich man has judged that he was not
deserving of help. I forget what Lazarus did about the thirsty gentleman
in Hades--probably he did not regard him as deserving either.

With most of us a charitable impulse is like the wave made by a stone
thrown into a pool--it gets fainter and fainter the farther it has to
go. Generally it does not go the length of a city block. It is not
enough that there is a starving cripple across the way--he must be on
your own doorstep to rouse any interest. When we invest any of our money
in charity we want twenty per cent interest, and we want it quarterly.
We also wish to have a list of the stockholders made public. A man who
habitually smokes two thirty-cent cigars after dinner will drop a
quarter into the plate on Sunday and think he is a good Samaritan.

The truth of the matter is that whatever instinct leads us to contribute
toward the alleviation of the obvious miseries of the poor should
compel us to go further and prevent those miseries--or as many of them
as we can--from ever arising at all.

So far as I am concerned, the division of goodness into seven or more
specific virtues is purely arbitrary. Virtue is generic. A man is either
generous or mean--unselfish or selfish. The unselfish man is the one who
is willing to inconvenience or embarrass himself, or to deprive himself
of some pleasure or profit for the benefit of others, either now or
hereafter.

By the same token, now that I have given thought to the matter, I
confess that I am a selfish man--at bottom. Whatever generosity I
possess is surface generosity. It would no