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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