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Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens
page 23 of 310 (07%)
made it perfectly manifest that a set of lazy vagabonds were
interposed between the general desire to do something to relieve
the sickness and misery under which the poor were suffering, and
the suffering poor themselves. That many who sought to do some
little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of
preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening
those wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent
knaves cumbering society. That imagination, - soberly following
one of these knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and
comparing it with the life of one of these poor in a cholera-
stricken alley, or one of the children of one of these poor,
soothed in its dying hour by the late lamented Mr. Drouet, -
contemplated a grim farce, impossible to be presented very much
longer before God or man. That the crowning miracle of all the
miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the
blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead
to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to
them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut
off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the
rottenness of their youth - for of flower or blossom such youth has
none - the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and
unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty
wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post-
Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for
the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last
Great Day as anything towards it.

The poor never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike
their habits. The writers are public robbers; and we who support
them are parties to their depredations. They trade upon every
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