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One of the risks of benevolence is its tendency to lower the recipient to the condition of an alms-taker. Doles from poor's-boxes have this enfeebling effect; but a poor neighbour giving a destitute widow a help in her time of need is felt to be a friendly act, and is alike elevating to the character of both.
When we're down in Mexico that time, with old Zach Taylor, an' needs meat, we don't go ridin' our mounts to death combin' the hills for steers. All we does is round up a band of padres, or monks, an' then trade 'em to their par'lyzed congregations for cattle. We used to get about ten steers for a padre; an' we doles out them divines, one at a time, as we needs the beef.
The poor in rich neighborhoods, or in neighborhoods where alms are lavishly given, are less kind to each other, and the whole tone of a neighborhood can be lowered, mistrust and jealousy being substituted for neighborly helpfulness, by undiscriminating doles from those whose kindly but condescending attitude has quite blinded them to the everyday facts of the neighborhood life.
Get-Rich-Quick has moved on to the shifting and more exciting opportunities of the cities, where poor human nature, aided and abetted by weak philanthropy, and demagogic fishing for votes by eleemosynary legislation, provides him with a mild form of riotous living, and a fatted calf of doles in case of accident, sickness, penury, or old age.
No doubt even now he was chuckling at the spectacle of Starratt running about the street picking up the doles. He decided, once and for all, that he wouldn't go on being an object of satirical charity. He wouldn't refuse the Hilmer business, but he would put it on the proper basis.
He arranged for the provision of stores in the public granaries with such liberality, that within the memory of man there had never been such astonishing abundance; and with a view to extending the general prosperity to the lowest class, he organised numerous doles to be paid out of his private fortune, which made it possible for the very poor to participate in the general banquet from which they had been excluded for long enough.
So far from being introduced, they burst their way in. Their audiences follow them as if they were actors, bought and paid to do so; the agent is there to meet them in the middle of the basilica, where the doles of money are handed over as openly as the doles of food at a banquet; and they are ready to pass from one court to another for a similar bribe.
And all these people seemed to be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters, watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing doles to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by slippery-looking fellows in black the whole with such an air of ease and good-humour that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a part of the show as the tumbling acrobats and animals.
The young pianist, Tausig, visits him, and he thinks of him as his son, saying, "My childless marriage is suddenly blest with an interesting phenomenon." But the young Tausig gives him unlimited cares, and "devours my biscuits, which my wife doles out grudgingly even to me." His allusions to Minna are always full of tender solicitude, though it is evident that she wears upon him.
It may be objected that if we undertake to sell food at lower than the ordinary market rates, we shall interfere with the legitimate operations of trade. But to this we would answer that the same objection would be still more true in regard to charitable doles, which are given for nothing.
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