I wish, sometimes, that they would not say they were going to send
the money back; but I wish this rather for their sake than for mine.
I am pretty well inured to the disappointment sure to follow; but I
am afraid that the poor pretense demoralizes them, and, above all, I
do not wish to demoralize them by my connivance. Once, when I was a
visitor for the Associated Charities in Boston, the question came up
in the weekly meeting whether, if one gave money when there was no
hope of getting work, one ought to let the beneficiary suppose that
one expected to get it back. Ought one to say that he was making his
gift a loan? Would it not be better to treat it frankly as a gift? A
man to whose goodness I mentally uncover said he had given that point
some thought, and he believed one ought not to pretend that it was a
loan when it was not; but one might fitly say, “I let you have this
money. If you are ever able to give it back, I shall be glad to have
you do so.” It seems to me that this is the wisest possible word on the
subject.
Of course the reason why we have such a bad conscience in giving
is that we feel we ought not to pauperize people. Perhaps this is
one reason why we give so little to obvious destitution. I am this
moment just in from the street, where I gave alms to a one-armed
tatterdemalion, with something of this obscure struggle in my mind.
As I came up with him, well fenced against the bitter wind that blew
through his ruins, I foresaw that I should give him something, and
I took from my outside pocket all the change there was in it--three
coppers, a nickel, and a piece of twenty-five. I was ashamed to give
the coppers, and I felt that a good citizen ought not to give a quarter
for fear of pauperizing a man who had already nothing in the world, and
no hopeful appearance of being able to get anything. So I gave him the
nickel, and I am not quite easy in my mind about it.
Perhaps I was remotely influenced not to give a quarter to this
one-armed man by the behavior of another one-armed man whom I
befriended. I did give him a quarter, not from a good impulse, but
because I had no smaller change, and it was that or nothing. The gift
seemed to astound him. It was in a shoe-store, where I had only one
boot on, in the process of trying a pair, and I was quite helpless
against him when he burst into blessings of Irish picturesqueness, and
asked my name, apparently that he might pray for me without making a
mistake in the address; and when I said, from a natural bashfulness, or
a mean fear that he might find me out at home and come again to beg of
me, that I would take the chance of the answer of his prayers getting
to me, he told me all about the railroad accident that lost him his
arm; and not content with this, he took his poor stump--as if to prove
that it was real--and rubbed it over me, and blessed me and blessed me
again, till I was quite ashamed of getting so much more than my money’s
worth. Shall I own that I began to fear this grateful man was not
entirely sober?