haughtiness wherewith the opportunity of alms-giving is received by
travellers.

In nothing do we show how far the West is from the East so emphatically
as we show it by our lofty ways towards those who so manifestly put
themselves at our feet. It is certainly not pleasant to see them there;
but silence or a storm of impersonal protest--a protest that appeals
vaguely less to the beggars than to some not impossible police--does not
seem the most appropriate manner of rebuking them. We have, it may be, a
scruple on the point of human dignity, compromised by the entreaty and
the thanks of the mendicant; but we have a strange way of vindicating
that dignity when we refuse to man, woman, or child the recognition of a
simply human word. Nay, our offence is much the greater of the two. It
is not merely a rough and contemptuous intercourse, it is the refusal of
intercourse--the last outrage. How do we propose to redress those
conditions of life that annoy us when a brother whines, if we deny the
presence, the voice, and the being of this brother, and if, because
fortune has refused him money, we refuse him existence?

We take the matter too seriously, or not seriously enough, to hold it in
the indifference of the wise. "Have patience, little saint," is a phrase
that might teach us the cheerful way to endure our own unintelligible
fortunes in the midst, say, of the population of a hill-village among the
most barren of the Maritime Alps, where huts of stone stand among the
stones of an unclothed earth, and there is no sign of daily bread. The
people, albeit unused to travellers, yet know by instinct what to do, and
beg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwonted
figure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form
of refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest--it is worth while
to remember--is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to the