on the thirty families, who were just going to tramp off those three hundred acres into the Rhine-land, if she had not kept them in both senses this winter, and left them on my hands—once beggars, always beggars.

C. Hugo. Well, I’m a practical man, and I say, the sharper the famine, the higher are prices, and the higher I sell, the more I can spend; so the money circulates, Sir, that’s the word—like water—sure to run downwards again; and so it’s as broad as it’s long; and here’s a health—if there was any beer—to the farmers’ friends, ‘A bloody war and a wet harvest.’

Abbot. Strongly put, though correctly. For the self-interest of each it is which produces in the aggregate the happy equilibrium of all.

C. Wal. Well—the world is right well made, that’s certain; and He who made the Jews’ sin our salvation may bring plenty out of famine, and comfort out of covetousness. But look you, Sirs, private selfishness may be public weal, and yet private selfishness be just as surely damned, for all that.

3d Count. I hold, Sir, that every alms is a fresh badge of slavery.

C. Wal. I don’t deny it.

3d Count. Then teach them independence.

C. Wal. How? By tempting them to turn thieves, when begging fails? By keeping their stomachs just at desperation-point? By starving them out here, to march off, starving all the way, to some town, in search of employment, of which, if they find it, they know no more than my horse? Likely! No, Sir, to make men of them, put them not out of the reach, but out of the need, of charity.

3d Count. And how, prithee? By teaching them, like our fair Landgravine, to open their mouth for all that drops? Thuringia is become a kennel of beggars in her hands.

C. Wal. In hers? In ours, Sir!

Abbot. Idleness, Sir, deceit, and immorality, are the three children of this same barbarous self-indulgence in almsgiving. Leave the poor alone. Let want teach them the need of self-exertion, and misery prove the foolishness of crime.

C. Wal. How? Teach them to become men by leaving them brutes?

Abbot. Oh, Sir, there we step in, with the consolations and instructions of the faith.

C. Wal. Ay, but while the grass is growing the steed is starving; and in the meantime, how 

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