Page:Vidyasagar, the Great Indian Educationist and Philanthropist.djvu/22

 sympathy. To open ragged schools for the street Arabs, to provide better houses for people who dwell in squalid dens of vice and infamy and commit every kind of atrocity without shame or remorse, to reclaim juvenile mendicants from the "Serbonian bog" of corruption "where armies whole have sunk," to find fit work for disabled persons, he spent much of his precious life-blood. There are men so fastidious and conscientious that they never bestow alms lest they should be guilty of indiscriminate charity. They persuade themselves into the belief that mere heartless criticisms would suffice to drain and ventilate the morals of the fallen and the outcast and make for their temporal and eternal welfare. Poor Isvar Chandra had no such worldly scruples and twilight virtues. He was touched to the core of his heart when he saw people in sore straits. The genial current of the soul flowed on unchecked even by chill penury. At times it broke the dam of limited income and inundated the country around,