Page:Australian views of England.djvu/79

  "To the Editor of the Times. ",

"Your correspondent 'Australian,' on his way to the City yesterday, sees a pretty little girl, miserably dad and shoeless, crying in the street, and no man regarding her. The day is bitter, and he is touched. He asks her why she cries, and whether she has no friends. She replies that she is 'so cold,' and that she has no parents alive. He then gives her 'a trifle,' and, after commending her to the humane consideration of a policeman, proceeds on his way, moralising and wondering 'why, in this rich city, there appears to be no philanthropic machinery in existence which would extend a helping band to such a little innocent.'

"Now, sir, as 'Australian' represents a large class of the benevolent public, will you permit me to point out to him that the 'philanthropic machinery' in this case should have been found in his own person?

"Why, if so much interested in this poor child, did he not write her name and address, or the place she slept in the previous night, in his pocket-book? It would not have taken so long as writing his letter to the Times did, and he would have had the opportunity, either in person or by proxy, of helping, possibly rescuing from a future life of fraud and crime, this one innocent, and perhaps others.

"But no; he did precisely the thing he ought not to have done. He gave her 'a trifle.' Did he see what she did with it? His uncommunicative policeman probably did, and smiled grimly as he watched her run round the comer into the adjacent gin-shop, and give it into the hand of the blear-eyed hag who had hired her for the day, and who, with a greater or less blasphemy in proportion to the amount of the contribution, drives her back into the cold to distil more tears of 'unmanned fathers' into gin.

"For 'Australian,' as a stranger, there is every excuse; but, in truth, this most common, mischievous, and selfish mode of administering alms is adopted by a great proportion of the public who ought to know better. The vast commerce, the restless activity