The very heart and core of the poor-law difficulty is to discriminate between poverty deserving of help, and only requiring it just to tide over an ugly crisis, and those male and female pests of every civilised community whose natural complexion is dirt, whose brow would sweat at the bare idea of earning their bread, and whose stock-in-trade is rags and impudence. In his capacity of guardian of the casual ward, Mr. Bumble is a person who has no belief in decent poverty. To his way of thinking, poverty in a clean shirt is no more than a dodge intended to impose on the well-known tenderness of his disposition. Penury in a tidy cotton gown, to his keen discernment, is nothing better than “farden pride”—a weakness he feels it is his bounden duty to snub and correct whenever he meets with it. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that all the worthy strivers in the battle for bread, and who, through misfortune and sickness, sink in the rucks and furrows of that crowded field, find their way, by a sort of natural “drainage system,” to the workhouse. There are poorer folks than paupers. To be a pauper is at least to have a coat to wear, none the less warm because it is made of gray cloth, and to have an undisputed claim on the butcher and the baker. It is the preservers of their “farden pride,” as Bumble stigmatises it, but which is really bravery and noble patience, who are most familiar with the scratching at their door of the gaunt wolf FAMINE; the hopeful unfortunates who are content to struggle on, though with no more than the tips of their unlucky noses above the waters of tribulation—to struggle and still struggle, though they sink, rather than acknowledge themselves no better than the repulsive mob of cadgers by profession Mr. Bumble classes them with.