Let us explain. To bestow money, soup, blankets, and Bibles, is an easy duty; plenty of people will come for them; the demand is always equal to the supply. Society abounds with mean, lazy, drunken persons who do not wish to sweat and toil. There are men redolent of strong drink, tobacco, and filth, who “take the liberty of waiting upon your honor” to narrate tales of woe. They cannot get work; they owe five weeks rent; their wives are ill; their children have no bread. They are “poor fellows who wouldn’t come, but hunger is a sharp thorn,” and so on. There are women who knock at the door, and send in little, cramped, flattering, lying notes. Their husbands are in the hospital; they are going to be confined of their sixth child; they have four children ill of the small-pox; they have nothing to eat; they smell of whiskey, but that is of no consequence. A leetle drop they say, is a comfort, and they don’t get drunk. There are little girls who call upon us to say that their father fell from a scaffold, and greatly needs some money to get him a morsel of fresh meat--the said father being then waiting round the corner for the anticipated gift. There are boys who follow us from square to square with a wretched whine, and telling a score of details about their daily sufferings, but taking care not to whisper a word of the short pipe, the smoking pudding, the pot of ale, and the visit to the Circus or Theatre, with which they solace themselves after the public labors and sufferings of the day. And there are the dramatic beggars--men who crouch behind a scroll, on which is written STARVATION; the pathetic beggars--women who sit on door-steps, with cold tears rolling down their cheeks; the rural beggars--picturesque beggars--and all other kinds of beggars. Who is to be held responsible for this army of beggars? To a large extent, (we reply) careless alms-givers. People who give to any and to all that ask, create pauperism. They bribe the feeble and the wicked to adopt the disgraceful profession of a mendicant. In saying this we do not depreciate, nor do we seek to hinder that charity which God loveth. To bestow an alms is often a duty; when well bestowed it is pleasing to God. Not so with almsgiving as it is. That is a moral blight; it has produced a generation of liars, thieves, drunkards, and prostitutes; it is a demon in the garb of an angel; idleness, falsehood, dirt, ignorance, and crime, are its foul results. We appeal to facts and witnesses. Mendicants, paupers, and thieves abound; they are of all nations. We have them from Ireland, from Africa, from India, and from amongst ourselves. They are of all ages; old and young, parents and children come before us. They are of all kinds; some in silk, some in broad-cloth, some in fustian, and some in rags. Their sores are artificial; their tales are got up; their lives are most unholy shams.