My friend who was not sure that Christ’s doctrine was the last word in
regard to charity, was quite sure that you ought to have a conscience
against dead-beats, whom I suggested for his consideration, especially
the dead-beats who come to your house and try to work you upon one
pretext or another. He said he never gave to them, and I asked what
he answered them when they professed themselves in instant want; and
whether he plumply denied them; and it appeared that he told them he
had other use for his money. I suspect this was a proper answer to
make. It had never occurred to me, but I think I will try it with the
next one who comes, and see what effect it has upon him. Hitherto I
have had no better way than to offer them a compromise: if they ask
twenty, to propose ten; and if they ask ten, to propose five; and so on
down. The first time I did this (it was with an actor, who gave me his
I O U--the first and only I O U that I ever got: I suppose he was used
to giving it on the stage) it seemed to me that I had made ten dollars,
and since then it has seemed to me that I made five dollars on several
occasions; but I now think this was an illusion, and that I only saved
the money: I did not actually add to my store.
It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these
imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic
school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle
to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would
be cheaper. Last winter there came to me a gentleman thrown out of
employment by the completion of an encyclopedia he had been at work
on, and he said that he was in absolute want of food for his family,
who had that morning been set out with all his household stuff on the
sidewalk for default of rent. I relieved his immediate necessity, and
suggested to him that if he would write a simple, unrhetorical account
of his eviction I could probably sell it for him; that this sort of
thing mostly happened to the inarticulate classes; and that he had
the chance of doing a perfectly fresh thing in literature. He caught
at the notion, and said he would begin at once, and I said the sooner
the better. He asked if it would not be well to get the narrative
type-written, and I begged him not to wait for that; but he said that
he knew a person who would typewrite it for him without charge. I
could only urge haste, and he went away in a glow of enterprise. He
left with me the address of a twenty-five cent lodging-house in the
Bowery; for he explained that he had got money enough, by selling his
furniture on the sidewalk to send his family into the country, and
he was living alone and as cheaply as he could. While at work on his
narrative he came for more relief, and then he vanished out of my
knowledge altogether. I had a leisure afternoon, and went down into the
Bowery to his lodging-house, and found that he really lodged there,
but he was then out; and so far as I am concerned he is out still. I am
out myself, in the amount I advanced him, and which he was to repay me
from the money for his eviction article. He never wrote it, apparently;
and perhaps his experience of eviction lacked the vital element of
reality. I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist, for he was an
Englishman, and the Englishmen are all romanticists.