“But there are deserving poor,” said Dinneford.  “We cannot shut our hearts against all who seek for help.”

“The deserving poor,” replied Mr. Paulding, “are never common beggars—­never those who solicit in the street or importune from house to house.  They try always to help themselves, and ask for aid only when in great extremity.  They rarely force themselves on your attention; they suffer and die often in dumb despair.  We find them in these dreary and desolate cellars and garrets, sick and starving and silent, often dying, and minister to them as best we can.  If the money given daily to idle and vicious beggars could be gathered into a fund and dispensed with a wise Christian charity, it would do a vast amount of good; now it does only evil.”

“You are doubtless right in this,” returned Mr. Dinneford.  “Some one has said that to help the evil is to hurt the good, and I guess his saying is near the truth.”

“If you help the vicious and the idle,” was answered, “you simply encourage vice and idleness, and these never exist without doing a hurt to society.  Withhold aid, and they will be forced to work, and so not only do something for the common good, but be kept out of the evil ways into which idleness always leads.

“So you see, sir, how wrong it is to give alms to the vast crew of beggars that infest our cities, and especially to the children who are sent out daily to beg or steal as opportunity offers.

“But there is another view of the case, continued Mr. Paulding, “that few consider, and which would, I am sure, arouse the people to immediate action if they understood it as I do.  We compare the nation to a great man.  We call it a ‘body politic.’  We speak of its head, its brain, its hands, its feet, its arteries and vital forces.  We know that no part of the nation can be hurt without all the other parts feeling in some degree the shock and sharing the loss or suffering.  What is true of the great man of the nation is true of our smaller communities, our States and cities and towns.  Each is an aggregate man, and the health and well-being of this man depend on the individual men and the groups and societies of men by which it is constituted.  There cannot be an unhealthy organ in the human system without a communication of disease to the whole body.  A diseased liver or heart or lung, a useless hand or foot, an ulcer or local obstruction, cannot exist without injury and impediment to the whole.  In the case of a malignant ulcer, how soon the blood gets poisoned!

“Now, here is a malignant ulcer in the body politic of our city.  Is it possible, do you think, for it to exist, and in the virulent condition we find it, and not poison the blood of our whole community?  Moral and spiritual laws are as unvarying in their action, out of natural sight though they be, as physical laws.  Evil and good are as positive entities as fire, and destroy or consume as surely.  As certainly as an ulcer poisons with its malignant ichor