Page:Life of Octavia Hill as told in her letters.djvu/249

 my way some distance, I think, and have written a few words on the subject, which I hope some day to print). I think that when gifts are given and received by the same person, they are ennobling. It is the greediness of the recipient that is the awful result at present; and the helpless indolence of expectant selfishness. Call the man out of himself by letting him know the joy of receiving and giving, and you may pour your gifts upon him, even lavishly, and not corrupt him. Besides this, let us give better things; sympathy, friendship, intercourse; let us be friends, and then we can give with comparative impunity. For the hearts of people always feel the spiritual gift to be the greater if it be genuine at all. Where a material gift comes as a witness of real love, it is the love that is the all-absorbing thought, not the gift, be it ever so much needed. All presents, too, should depend to some degree on character; we do not to one another select those calculated to deepen any tendency we disapprove, rather to awake fresh admiration of what is noble.

I cry out to myself in the courts every day, "What a frightful confusion of chances we have here as to how or whether there is to be food or not!" A man accepts underpaid work; a little is scraped up by one child, a little begged by another; a gigantic machinery of complicated charities relieves a man of half his responsibilities, not once and for all clearly and definitely, but—probably or possibly—he gets help here or there. There is no certainty, no quiet, no order in his way of subsisting. And he has an innate sense that his most natural wants ought to be supplied if he works; so he takes our gifts thanklessly; and then we blame him or despise him for his alternate servility and ingratitude; and we dare not use his large desires to urge him to