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And so Eunice labored on ten years in her benevolent duty, and the two were happy. When she died she left a little money, accumulated and saved day by day, to her aged companion; and the only great grief she felt was for her mistress, for she saw no other way of support possible to her than that of the institution she had so long and so successfully labored to save her from.

When you degrade man, and crowd him down instead of elevating and honoring him, it makes little difference whether the act be in regard of one man in higher honor at times than another; you commit an error that cries out against all your theories of religion, education, and refinement. If you build up yourself on another's ruins, may you not fear the foundation beneath will utter groans, and finally crumble? Can there be a lasting peace or condition of quiet where, in town or State, there exists by law and practice a foul wrong so eminently unjust as that of denying to the aged and suffering poor, simply because of their poverty, the rights of citizenship and the protection of the laws -- aye, that permits them to be placed in circumstances where human selfishness and meanness can have full power of action, to their real distress and humiliation of the body and mind? If it must be that the poor we have ever with us, it is not necessary that we should ourselves be the guilty party in the cause of their poverty, especially in adding to their mortification and despair.

Such provision should be made for the poor as will relieve and comfort those who are driven by their want to cast themselves on the public charity. Give them work such as they can do; preserve their own self-respect; cheer them, encourage them, bless them. We can see no good reason for disfranchising men of poverty, who are not criminals. Are there not hundreds and thousands of men in every State in New England who are, in respect to themselves, absolutely paupers, but who are living on their friends, or on their own brazen wits, or on borrowed capital; yet not disfranchised, because, forsooth, they have not been entered paupers on the books of the town?

Something akin to this has been advanced by another writer on the general subject of pauperism, and more particularly on its development in crowded cities. He says: "Where the poor are admitted to a just share in the privileges of society, the benefits for which government was appointed, and are so educated as to be prepared to avail themselves of those privileges, there the higher classes are constantly recruited by a virtuous and disciplined energy that, under such a beneficent system, has made its way from the lower, and the great end of a good government is gained, and all classes are pledged for its support and security."

He further says: "But if, instead of the poor having hope, they are trampled down into despair; if, by the neglect, selfishness, and oppression of the government (and neglect on the part of the government is itself, in his thing, oppression,) and the grasping avarice and, selfish luxury of the wealthy, they are kept in ignorance and wretchedness, and thus their very poverty is made the destruction of the poor, by such diabolic crushing operations of the social state as effectually forbid the poor man, or the virtuous and conscientious poor, to rise, there is no reprieve for such a state from utter perdition. The causes of rottenness and ruin are at work as powerfully and certainly in the very prosperity of the upper classes as in the ignorance and riot of vicious elements in the lower, and like the crater of a slumbering volcano, all will tumble in upon the same fire, or perhaps in some awful eruption, bury the social state in desolation." (14)

CHAPTER XXXV.
MR SIDDLETON'S idea of the Gospel. Somehow or other our ideas are not always the same, nor are they always just. But if we happen to hit on right notions, by all means let them out. They may do somebody good.

The last time Siddleton took the paupers off the hands of the town, there was a great noisy town-meeting discussion of the whole case. Many of the former opponents of the measures advocated by the "reformers," as they were called, came over from their party and voted for reform. Among these were Abraham Bacon and John Stoddard. They had seen enough in their own management to prove that the paupers might be supported at much less expense to the town than they now were; and as their tax was a heavy one, they, out of purely selfish regard, voted to abolish the system of public sale, and purchase a town farm, to be carried on under the care of some person of faithful and economical character for the ultimate benefit of the town.

By the small majority of fifteen votes, the town carried through the old measure of farming out the paupers to the lowest bidder. There was great rejoicing among the reformers at the announcement: it was the promise of success ere long. The subject having been warmly and intelligently discussed, many who voted with the old party began to waver and say they were almost convinced that the new measure was worthy of a trial. Squire Ben, Lawyer Tools, and Mr. Savage, were put in selectmen, Mr. Haddock and his party being all crowded out; the vote was too close for the exercise of any party liberality.