It is very easy to raise money for charity.  Subscription lists constantly attest the fact.  A rich man is asked by some influential person for money.  It is very easy to give it.  It saves time to give it.  It is considered a religious duty to give it.  Yet to give money unthinkingly, to give it without considering how it is to be used,—­instead of being for the good of our fellow-creatures,—­may often prove the greatest injury we could inflict upon them.  True benevolence does not consist in giving money.  Nor can charitable donations, given indiscriminately to the poor, have any other effect than to sap the foundations of self-respect, and break down the very outworks of virtue itself.  There are many forms of benevolence which create the very evils they are intended to cure, and encourage the poorer classes in the habit of dependence upon the charity of others,—­to the neglect of those far healthier means of social well-being which lie within their own reach.

One would think that three million a year were sufficient to relieve all the actual distress that exists in London.  Yet the distress, notwithstanding all the money spent upon it, goes on increasing.  May not the money spent in charity, create the distress it relieves,—­besides creating other distress which it fails to relieve?  Uneducated and idle people will not exert themselves for a living, when they have the hope of obtaining the living without exertion.  Who will be frugal and provident, when charity offers all that frugality and providence can confer?  Does not the gift of the advantages, comforts, and rewards of industry, without the necessity of labouring for them, tend to sap the very foundations of energy and self-reliance?  Is not the circumstance that poverty is the only requisite qualification on the part of the applicant for charity, calculated to tempt the people to self-indulgence, to dissipation, and to those courses of life which keep them poor?

Men who will not struggle and exert themselves, are those who are helped first.  The worst sort of persons are made comfortable:  whilst the hard-working, self-supporting man, who disdains to throw himself upon charity, is compelled to pay rates for the maintenance of the idle.  Charity stretches forth its hand to the rottenest parts of society; it rarely seeks out, or helps, the struggling and the honest.  As Carlyle has said, “O my astonishing benevolent friends! that never think of meddling with the material while it continues sound; that stress and strain it with new rates and assessments, till even it has given way and declared itself rotten; whereupon you greedily snatch at it, and say, ‘Now let us try to do some good upon it!’”

The charity which merely consists in giving, is an idle indulgence—­often an idle vice.  The mere giving of money will never do the work of philanthropy.  As a recent writer has said, “The crimes of the virtuous, the blasphemies of the pious, and the follies of the wise, would scarcely fill a larger volume than the cruelties of the humane.  In this world a large part of the occupation of the wise has been to neutralize the efforts of the good.”