London
population are relieved by charitable institutions.

It is very easy to raise money for charity. Subscription lists
constantly attest the fact. A rich man is asked by some influential
person for money. It is very easy to give it. It saves time to give it.
It is considered a religious duty to give it. Yet to give money
unthinkingly, to give it without considering how it is to be
used,--instead of being for the good of our fellow-creatures,--may often
prove the greatest injury we could inflict upon them. True benevolence
does not consist in giving money. Nor can charitable donations, given
indiscriminately to the poor, have any other effect than to sap the
foundations of self-respect, and break down the very outworks of virtue
itself. There are many forms of benevolence which create the very evils
they are intended to cure, and encourage the poorer classes in the habit
of dependence upon the charity of others,--to the neglect of those far
healthier means of social well-being which lie within their own reach.

One would think that three million a year were sufficient to relieve all
the actual distress that exists in London. Yet the distress,
notwithstanding all the money spent upon it, goes on increasing. May not
the money spent in charity, create the distress it relieves,--besides
creating other distress which it fails to relieve? Uneducated and idle
people will not exert themselves for a living, when they have the hope
of obtaining the living without exertion. Who will be frugal and
provident, when charity offers all that frugality and providence can
confer? Does not the gift of the advantages, comforts, and rewards of
industry, without the necessity of labouring for them, tend to sap the
very foundations of energy and self-reliance? Is not the circumstance
that poverty is the only requisite qualification on the part of the
applicant for charity, calculated to tempt the people to
self-indulgence, to dissipation, and to those courses of life which keep
them poor?

Men who will not struggle and exert themselves, are those who are helped
first. The worst sort of persons are made comfortable: whilst the
hard-working, self-supporting man, who disdains to throw himself upon
charity, is compelled to pay rates for the maintenance of the idle.
Charity stretches forth its hand to the rottenest parts of society; it
rarely seeks out, or helps, the struggling and the honest. As Carlyle
has said, "O my astonishing benevolen