That charity meant this, and nothing more, was long the conviction, as it was the tradition, of society. It was thought to have the highest Christian sanction. There were to be always poor among us. The poor were to be relieved, and relief, or charity, consists in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Yet out of that simple, unreflecting, seemingly innocent faith, have sprung enormous suffering, demoralization, and crime. The whole subject of charitable relief was as misunderstood as that of penal imprisonment before John Howard. There will be criminals, was the theory, and they must be punished. They must therefore be secured in jails, and the object of imprisonment is intimidation from crime, not the improvement of criminals. The result of this view was that society dismissed the subject, and regarded prisoners as mere outcasts, so that the inhumanity of their treatment was revolting. Happily the neglect revenged itself. The jails became sores. They were nurseries of loathsome disease. Judges and sheriffs were smitten by the pestilence that exhaled from prisons, and John Howard, like a purifying angel, in cleansing the prisons began also to cleanse society. So alms-giving and the relief of the poor arrested the attention of humane persons who were not content with Elia's philosophy. They had sometimes watched the skilful street performer, and had seen him slip round the corner and spend at the gin-palace in a dram the money which, with some fine histrionic genius, he had besought for the sick wife and the starving children. They found the wife was also an accomplished histrione, and that the children were receiving parental instruction in the same calling. They found that the amiable, careless, unquestioning alms-giving was breeding a class of paupers, people who did not seek work nor wish to work, but who lived, and who meant to live, by beggary, who bred their children to do likewise, and whose haunts and associations and habits became great nurseries of crime. The evil had become enormous, and was most deeply seated before it was accurately observed. But wise men and wise women everywhere are now, and for some years have been, earnestly engaged in studying how to save society from the curse of pauperism, while taking care that all helpless and innocent suffering shall be relieved. This is what Elia and his amiable, thoughtless friends denounce as "machine charity." But their amiability is only selfishness. How many of those who decry "machine charity" ever went home with a single street beggar to whom they gave, or ever ascertained or cared whether his story was true, or told for any other purpose than to get the price of a dram? What they call their Christian charity and common humanity and apostolic alms-giving is often mere fostering of lying, drunkenness, and crime, and the indefinite increase of suffering.