A graver defect of giving is its arbitrary character. Our reformers have been attempting to rationalize charity and certainly have devised methods by which some of its worst evils may be lessened. But until they stop it altogether they will not rid it of irrational wilfulness. One would say that in kind and degree my gift should answer another’s reasonable claim. But it never does. A just claim renders a gift impossible. Gifts come from a region outside claims, outside rational justification. They are the expression of arbitrary will. I give because I want to, and the other knows he has no right beyond my inclination to what he is receiving. Were there legitimate grounds for my pretended gift it would be merely the payment of a debt and would afford no such pleasure as does the over-and-above of a gift. A clerk may have satisfaction in his salary, but his feeling on receiving his employer’s gift is something altogether different. The gift dropped from the sky. He had no idea it was coming. He really had done nothing to deserve it. Others might have had it equally well, but by some fancy he had been picked out for enrichment. It is this unexpectedness, this incalculability, which makes a gift so good. Gifts at Christmas, which have been systematized, are of a paler order. Even in these there is usually uncertainty enough left to keep them agreeable. Our regular giver may decide to give elsewhere this year, he may forget; what he will select we cannot guess. The important part of the gift is not its intrinsic worth but its expression of the giver’s will. Gladness over the former springs from greed, over the latter from gratitude. This arbitrary will on the giver’s part and the absence of claim in the receiver make a reasonable gift hard to conceive. To be a gift at all it must be capricious, undeserved, and only occasional.