upon, or as having weakly gratified their consciences with a lazy,
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flimsy substitute for the noblest of all virtues. There is a man
at large, at the moment when this paper is preparing for the press
(on the 29th of April, 1850), and never once taken up yet, who,
within these twelvemonths, has been probably the most audacious and
the most successful swindler that even this trade has ever known.
There has been something singularly base in this fellow’s
proceedings; it has been his business to write to all sorts and
conditions of people, in the names of persons of high reputation
and unblemished honour, professing to be in distress – the general
admiration and respect for whom has ensured a ready and generous
reply.
Now, in the hope that the results of the real experience of a real
person may do something more to induce reflection on this subject
than any abstract treatise – and with a personal knowledge of the
extent to which the Begging-Letter Trade has been carried on for
some time, and has been for some time constantly increasing – the
writer of this paper entreats the attention of his readers to a few
concluding words. His experience is a type of the experience of
many; some on a smaller, some on an infinitely larger scale. All
may judge of the soundness or unsoundness of his conclusions from
it.
Long doubtful of the efficacy of such assistance in any case
whatever, and able to recall but one, within his whole individual
knowledge, in which he had the least after-reason to suppose that
any good was done by it, he was led, last autumn, into some serious
considerations. The begging-letters flying about by every post,
made it perfectly manifest that a set of lazy vagabonds were
interposed between the general desire to do something to relieve
the sickness and misery under which the poor were suffering, and
the suffering poor themselves. That many who sought to do some
little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of
preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening
those wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent
knaves cumbering society. That imagination, – soberly following
one of these knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and
comparing it with the life of one of these poor in a cholerastricken
alley, or one of the children of one of these poor,
soothed in its dying hour by the late lamented Mr. Drouet, –
contemplated a grim farce, impossible to be presented very much
longer before God or man. That the crowning miracle of all the
miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the
blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead
to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to
them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut
off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the
rottenness of their youth – for of flower or blossom such youth has
none – the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and
unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty
wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post-
Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for
the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last
Great Day as anything towards it.
The poor never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike
their habits. The writers are public robbers; and we who support
them are parties to their depredations. They trade upon every
circumstance within their knowledge that affects us, public or
private, joyful or sorrowful; they pervert the lessons of our
lives; they change what ought to be our strength and virtue into
weakness, and encouragement of vice. There is a plain remedy, and
it is in our own hands. We must resolve, at any sacrifice of
feeling, to be deaf to such appeals, and crush the trade.
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There are degrees in murder. Life must be held sacred among us in