one? or that it is cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man sober?  There is, I suppose, a dim idea in the mind of the public, that they don’t pay for the maintenance of people they don’t employ.  Those staggering rascals at the street corner, grouped around its splendid angle of public-house, we fancy that they are no servants of ours! that we pay them no wages! that no cash out of our pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter!

Whose cash is it then they are spending?  It is not got honestly by work.  You know that much.  Where do they get it from?  Who has paid for their dinner and their pot?  Those fellows can only live in one of two ways—­by pillage or beggary.  Their annual income by thieving comes out of the public pocket, you will admit.  They are not cheaply fed, so far as they are fed by theft.  But the rest of their living—­all that they don’t steal—­they must beg.  Not with success from you, you think.  Wise, as benevolent, you never gave a penny in “indiscriminate charity.”  Well, I congratulate you on the freedom of your conscience from that sin, mine being bitterly burdened with the memory of many a sixpence given to beggars of whom I knew nothing but that they had pale faces and thin waists.  But it is not that kind of street beggary that is the worst beggars’ trade.  Home alms which it is their worst degradation to receive.  Those scamps know well enough that you and your wisdom are worth nothing to them.  They won’t beg of you.  They will beg of their sisters, and mothers, and wives, and children, and of any one else who is enough ashamed of being of the same blood with them to pay to keep them out of sight.  Every one of those blackguards is the bane of a family.  That is the deadly “indiscriminate charity”—­the charity which each household pays to maintain its own private curse.

133.  And you think that is no affair of yours? and that every family ought to watch over and subdue its own living plague?  Put it to yourselves this way, then:  suppose you knew every one of those families kept an idol in an inner room—­a big-bellied bronze figure, to which daily sacrifice and oblation was made; at whose feet so much beer and brandy was poured out every morning on the ground; and before which, every night, good meat, enough for two men’s keep, was set, and left, till it was putrid, and then carried out and thrown on the dunghill; you would put an end to that form of idolatry with your best diligence, I suppose.  You would understand then that the beer, and brandy, and meat, were wasted; and that the burden imposed by each household on itself lay heavily through them on the whole community?  But, suppose further, that this idol were not of silent and quiet bronze only, but an ingenious mechanism, wound up every morning, to run itself down into automatic blasphemies; that it struck and tore with its hands the people who set food before it; that it was anointed with poisonous unguents, and infected the air for miles round.  You would interfere with the idolatry then, straightway?  Will you not interfere with it now, when the infection that they venomous idol spreads is not merely death, but sin?