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gift have been a willing one, it proves that A has also gained in giving and receiving what he did. A beggar may be considered in the light of the producer of an immaterial product, with quite as much propriety as a dancer, singer, or theatrical performer. The dancer furnishes a product to the consumer, in the shape of graceful movements, which inspire agreeable emotions; and the beggar has done the same, in the form of certain moral capabilities to move and gratify the finest feelings of our nature. In the first consequences, therefore, of that exchange which is called an act of charity, the addition to the sum of human pleasures is sometimes very great indeed, not only on the part of the receiver, but also on the part of the giver of all voluntary alms. We have only mentioned, as a value received in exchange for a charitable donation, the gratification of the donor's feelings; but it is obvious we might have added other values which are not unfrequently received; viz. the escape from vexatious importunities, from the sense of shame which attends the rejection of a needy man's petition, and from the censure of society which always attaches to the man who habitually refuses to relieve the distresses of the indigent; the anticipation of the mendicant's good word to others in praise of our liberality; the hope that the generous act we have performed may be known of men, and be an honor and a profit to us; the gratification of a curiosity to witness the proofs of thankfulness or submission in the mendicant ; the satisfaction of the pride we feel in being able to impress the beggar with a high opinion of our wealth or generosity, and many other considerations which occasionally enter into the aggregate of moral values which we purchase with our charitable gifts. It cannot then be said with any sort of propriety that the charitable man receives nothing in exchange for what he gives. If his recompense is the happiness he enjoys in communicating happiness, the recompense is frequently the highest and the purest he can possibly receive; and is no less real and effective than any other value recognised as such by political economists. If his compensation is some pleasure which less virtuous interests afford, then it may be said of him still more emphatically, Verily he has his reward.'

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How far this augmentation of human happiness may afterwards be affected by the evils which even private charity sometimes gives occasion to, we are not at present ready to discuss. That these evils have been overrated, we feel confident; particularly with respect to what regards the alleged stimulus given to population. The calculations of the poor man, when discussing with himself the propriety of marrying,

are certainly not affected by the mode in which the means of subsistence which he possesses were obtained; except inasmuch as he must necessarily look up to the succour of the charitable as a very precarious and discreditable support. Population will be therefore only increased (in case of almsgiving) in population to the added means which the humane have thus provided; and we really cannot see why it should not be permitted to increase in this proportion, as weil when the additional subsistence has been in exchange for the equivalents of charity, as when it has been given in return for more physical and palpable productions.

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The desire of administering relief, even when no object of compassion is before us, is as natural a desire, and one which as imperiously requires its appropriate gratification, as any other instinct or appetite whatever. The ardent longings and strong tendencies of love are not more incident to human nature, than the sympathies of pity, and the sweetnesses of charity. There exists, we are convinced, in almost every bosom, a yearning for an object of compassion, and an opportunity of exercising and employing the tenderer and gentier affections of the heart, Pity is akin to love' in a sense not intended by the poet. Each searches for an object and a resting place, and each derives from a temperate indulgence of its wishes, the highest and the holiest of pleasures. But the very essence of the joy which attends upon the exercise of charity, resides in its voluntary character. Touch it with the finger of constraint, and it changes into absolute indifference, and soon into downright aversion. The law may compel us to relieve, but it can never force us to pity the distressed; and in extorting the duties of beneficence, the very violence extinguishes the recompense; that recompense we mean, which constitutes at once the value and reward of well-directed charitythe pleasure of communicating pleasure, by a voluntary ellort of our own.

Our defence, it will be seen, has been confined to private charity alone. When that charity is wrested from the wealthy by main force (whether by the strong arm of the beggar, or by the violence of law, it matters not a jot,) there is an end of that mutual satisfaction which results only from a voluntary bargain, and which constitutes the only test of the actual increase of positive enjoyments. It may sometimes happen, that the increased pleasures of the indigent may more than balance the lost pleasures of the rich man who is compelled against his will to contribute to the succour of the poor; but this again

must be affected by the injury which the man of property sustains from the violent appropriation of his fortune to what is perhaps falsely deemed the interest of the state, and also by the unreasonable expectation held out by the large promises of public charities and poor laws.

In our view of this subject, then, the beggar is a producer, the producer of an immaterial product, but no less a producer than the painter and the poet. When charity is not compulsory, there takes place between the pauper and the almsgiver, a virtual exchange of what are called values in political economy; in settling the terms of which exchange, the charitable person acts frequently with as much deliberation as if he were purchasing a picture or a poem. Mendicity is, in this sense, a trade; a disgraceful trade no doubt, but no less a trade than selling whiskey or tobacco. It is regulated, too, like all other trades, by the proportion between the supply and the demand for the products which it furnishes. For example, let S represent the least sum of human goods, or rather the greatest privation of comforts and conveniences, which he who is willing to beg, is ready and able to endure rather than put an end to his existence. Now if the sums distributed in charity are such as to enable paupers to enjoy a share of comfort, in the least degree greater than S, the consequence will be, that those whose sufferings are equal to S (and many such are always to be found in the lower walks of life) will prefer the business of begging, as long as that business furnishes them a quantity of enjoyment greater than S. In this state of things, there may be said, with great propriety, to be a demand for beggars; and this demand will last until the accession of new mendicants have supplied sufficient means of satisfying the commiserative dispositions and almsgiving propensities of the charitable. If a farther supply of what may well be called the food of generous feelings be thrown into the market, then the products of the beggar, that is to say, the means he has of gratifying charitable tastes, will exceed the amount required by the compassionate; and of course, the profits of the beggar will be reduced by competition below S, and some will be excluded from the trade, or they must die.

Now, we confess we do not see how the support which is voluntarily given to the trade of begging, can possibly stimulate population, more than the support given to the producers of any product, material or immaterial, whatever. The beggar will not marry with less discretion than the shoeblack or the barber. He will calculate with equal care, the possible chances of supporting, in the sort of life to which he has been accus

tomed, a family of ordinary size. He will marry very often with heedlessness and precipitancy, but so will the taylor and the shoemaker. He is engaged in a pursuit which checks and stifles, it is true, that proud sense of independence, upon which we are accustomed to set so high a price, without reflecting that there scarcely is a trade or occupation in society which does not frequently require us to forego the lofty claims of even honorable pride. Nor is there any reason to believe that if the trade of begging were left, as all trades should be, to the unimpelled and unimpeded influence of private compromise and contract, there would result an undue increase of poverty and pauperism. The business of begging will never be a very tempting one. The mendicant is obliged to submit to the deepest degradations to which humanity is subject, and must part with much that even beggars surrender with reluctance. He must endure to be driven with contempt from the portals of the rich man, and to be spurned and insulted by the poorest of the poor, and the meanest of the mean. But in spite of all these natural discouragements to beggary, misfortune in ten thousand various shapes will frequently depress the poor man to the difficult alternative of starving, stealing, asking charity, or blowing out his brains. To the state of beggary some must come at last, and no human institutions promise to prevent this inevitable tendency of some part of the species to indigence and want. The objections, then, to private charity are reduced to the loss of those fine feelings that distinguish the man of honour from the pauper. In every other point of view, the trade of begging stands precisely on the footing on which other trades are now acknowledged universally to stand; viz. as a highly improper object of legislative interference, and as a business to be left to the sole management of the parties who are interested, or in any way concerned, in the transactions.

But when legislative bounties are extorted from the taxed to be given to the pauper or the mendicant, the case is very different indeed. The moral value to which we have alluded -the gratification of charitable feelings-which constitutes a full equivalent for private and voluntary eleemosynary expenditures, are utterly and absolutely lost, when the strong arm of law interposes to compel the contributor to furnish his proportion to the poor-fund, without granting him the smallest consideration in return. The quantity of want and mendicity in the state is no longer proportioned to the desire in the community to relieve it; but will exceed it in proportion to the extent of the provision which is made for its extinction. There is another very objectionable feature in public charitable insti

tutions: we mean the arbitrary and illimitable encouragement which they furnish to mendicity. When charity and penury are left to regulate themselves, what we have called the demand for objects of compassion will be necessarily limited by the very constitution of society. The supply of mendicants will then be limited by the limits of the demand, according to a principle in political economy too familiar to repeat. But when an arbitrary fund is provided for the poor who are engaged in the business of begging, there is nothing which restricts the indefinite augmentation of this fund, except the wisdom of our legislators; and how wise they are, may easily be inferred from the notorious fact, that there is scarcely one of them who does not gravely urge as proof of the necessity of more relief, the very increase of pauperism, which, in fact, the last relief, (without his knowledge) has produced. This legislative naïveté reminds of a worthy Irish clergyman who animated, it is said (we have forgotten where,) with a very laudable desire to prevent certain wicked books from infecting the minds of his parishioners, purchased at considerable expense all the copies he could lay his hands on, and burnt whole hecatombs of volumes with the greatest satisfaction and delight. To his utter astonishment, he found more of the obnoxious books the next year than he had at first. The mystery puzzled him exceedingly; but the remedy (as our statesmen say) was obvious. He ruined himself in a few years in endeavouring to exhaust the stock by buying with redoubled energy and soon died in want, utterly unable to understand how the more he burned the books, there should the more remain to burn.

Thus it is with many of our lawmakers. They go on, year after year, multiplying and extending the causes of the evil they endeavor to prevent, and then wonder, in the simple honesty of their hearts, why pauperism should increase precisely in proportion to the employment of what is meant to be its cure.

It is not only to the weakness of the arguments in this essay to which we have objections. The whole article is written in a style of cold-blooded speculation, which the author has mistaken for the calmness of philosophical discussion. It is a very great error to suppose, with the disciples of Godwin, that out of the complicated action and reaction of political forces, the best system which results is that into which the passions and affections enter the least as constituent elements. Those feelings which the author of this article has stigmatised as sentimental, will ever continue to modify the character of Vol. II. No. VIII.

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