The question is
simply this: we must feed the drunkard, vagabond, and thief; but shall we
do so by letting them steal their food, and do no work for it? or shall
we give them their food in appointed quantity, and enforce their doing
work which shall be worth it, and which, in process of time, will redeem
their own characters and make them happy and serviceable members of
society?
I find by me a violent little fragment of undelivered lecture, which puts
this, perhaps, still more clearly. Your idle people (it says), as they
are now, are not merely waste coal-beds. They are explosive coal-beds,
which you pay a high annual rent for. You are keeping all these idle
persons, remember, at far greater cost than if they were busy. Do you
think a vicious person eats less than an honest one? or that it is
cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man sober? There is, I
suppose, a dim idea in the mind of the public, that they don't pay for
the maintenance of people they don't employ. Those staggering rascals
at the street corner, grouped around its splendid angle of public-house,
we fancy that they are no servants of ours! that we pay them no wages!
that no cash out of our pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter!
Whose cash is it then they are spending? It is not got honestly by work.
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