112. Now this case, of which you see the entire authenticity, is, out of the many of which I hear continually, a _notably_ sad one only in so far as the artist in question has died of distress while he was catering for the public amusement. Hardly a week now passes without some such misery coming to my knowledge; and the quantity of pain, and anxiety of daily effort, through the best part of life, ending all at last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in England are now suffering, is so great that I feel constantly as if I were living in one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into them, out of sight. 113. Now I want you to observe here, in a definite case, the working of your beautiful modern political economy of "supply and demand." Here is a man who could have "supplied" you with good and entertaining art,--say for fifty good years,--if you had paid him enough for his day's work to find him and his children peacefully in bread. But you like having your prints as cheap as possible--you triumph in the little that your laugh costs--you take all you can get from the man, give the least you can give to him,--and you accordingly kill him at thirty-nine; and thereafter have his children to take care of, or to kill also, whichever you choose; but, now, observe, you must take care of _them_ for nothing, or not at all; and what you might have had good value for, if you had given it when it would have cheered the father's heart, you now can have no return for at all, to yourselves; and what you give to the orphans, if it does not degrade them, at least afflicts, coming, not through their father's hand, its honest earnings, but from strangers. Observe, farther, whatever help the orphans may receive, will not be from the public at all. It will not be from those who profited by their father's labors; it will be chiefly from his fellow-laborers; or from persons whose money would have been beneficially spent in other directions, from whence it is drawn away to this need, which ought never to have occurred,--while those who waste their money without doing any service to the public will never contribute one farthing to this distress. 114. Now it is this double fault in the help--that it comes too late, and that the burden of it falls wholly on those who ought least to be charged with it--which would be corrected by that institution of overseers of which I spoke to you in the twelfth of these letters, saying, you remember, that they were to have farther legal powers, which I did not then specify, but which would belong to them chiefly in the capacity of public almoners, or help-givers, aided by their deacons, the reception of such help, in time of true need, being not held disgraceful, but honorable; since the fact of its reception would be so entirely public that no impostor or idle person could ever obtain it surreptitiously.