_Mr. Forester._ You imagine an extreme case, which something more than the original want of fortune seems requisite to produce. _Mr. Fax._ I have heard you declaim very bitterly against those who maintain the necessary connection between misfortune and imprudence. _Mr. Forester._ Certainly. To assert that the unfortunate must necessarily have been imprudent, is to furnish an excuse to the cold-hearted and illiberal selfishness of a state of society, which needs no motive superadded to its own miserable narrow-mindedness, to produce the almost total extinction of benevolence and sympathy. Good and evil fortune depend so much on the combination of external circumstances, that the utmost skill and industry cannot command success; neither is the result of the most imprudent actions always fatal: Our indiscretions sometimes serve us well, When our deep plots do pall.[32] _Mr. Fax._ Sometimes, no doubt; but not so often as to equalise the probable results of indiscretion and prudence. ‘Where there is prudence,’ says Juvenal, ‘fortune is powerless’; and this doctrine, though liable to exceptions, is replete with general truth. We have a nice balance to adjust. To check the benevolence of the rich, by persuading them that all misfortune is the result of imprudence, is a great evil; but it would be a much greater evil to persuade the poor that indiscretion may have a happier result than prudence; for where this appears to be true in one instance, it is manifestly false in a thousand. It is certainly not enough to possess industry and talent; there must be means for exerting them; and in a redundant population these means are often wanting, even to the most skilful and the most industrious: but though calamity sometimes seizes those who use their best efforts to avoid her, yet she seldom disappoints the intentions of those who leap headlong into her arms. _Mr. Forester._ It seems, nevertheless, peculiarly hard that all the blessings of life should be confined to the rich. If you banish the smiles of love from the cottage of poverty, what remains to cheer its dreariness? The poor man has no friends, no amusements, no means of exercising benevolence, nothing to fill up the gloomy and desolate vacancy of his heart, if you banish love from his dwelling. ‘There is one alone, and there is not a second,’ says one of the greatest poets and philosophers of antiquity: ‘there is one alone, and there is not a second: yea, he hath neither child nor brother; yet is there no end of all his labour: ... neither saith he, For whom do I labour and bereave my soul of good?... Two are better than one ... for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.’[33] Society in poverty is better than solitude in wealth: but solitude and poverty together it is scarcely in human nature to tolerate.