The actual practice of fraud, even when you discover it, must give you
interesting question, unless you are cock-sure of your sociology. I was
once met by a little girl on a cross-street in a respectable quarter
of the town, who burst into tears at sight of me, and asked for money
to buy her sick mother bread. The very next day I was passing through
the same street, and I saw the same little girl burst into tears at
the sight of a benevolent-looking lady, whom undoubtedly she asked
for money for the same good object. The benevolent-looking lady gave
her nothing, and she tried her woes upon several other people, none
of whom gave her anything. I was forced to doubt whether, upon the
whole, her game was worth the candle, or whether she was really making
a provision for her declining years by this means. To be sure, her time
was not worth much, and she could hardly have got any other work, she
was so young; but it seemed hardly a paying industry. By any careful
calculation, I do not believe she would have been found to have amassed
more than ten or fifteen cents a day; and perhaps she really had a sick
mother at home. Many persons are obliged to force their emotions for
money, whom we should not account wholly undeserving; yet I suppose a
really good citizen who found this little girl trying to cultivate the
sympathies of charitable people by that system of irrigation would have
had her suppressed as an impostor.
In a way she was an impostor, though her sick mother may have been
starving, as she said. It is a nice question. Shall we always give to
him that asketh? Or shall we give to him that asketh only when we know
that he has come by his destitution honestly? In other words, what is
a deserving case of charity--or, rather, what is not? Is a starving or
freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious?
What is desert in the poor? What is desert in the rich, I suppose the
reader would answer. If this is so, and if we ought not to succor an
undeserving poor person, then we ought not to succor an undeserving
rich person. It will be said that a rich person, however undeserving
will never be in need of our succor, but this is not so clear. If we
saw a rich person fall in a fit before the horses of a Fifth Avenue
omnibus, ought not we to run and lift him up, although we knew him to
be a man whose life was stained by every vice and excess, and cruel,
wanton, idle, luxurious? I know that I am imagining a quite impossible
rich person; but once imagined, ought not we to save him all the same
as if he were deserving? I do not believe the most virtuous person will
say we ought not; and ought not we, then, to rescue the most worthless
tramp fallen under the wheels of the Juggernaut of want? Is charity the
reward of merit?