y a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in
the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant
by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of
childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He
believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had
been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor,
was his god and guide.'

This sense of the realities of the world,--laughter, happiness, the
simple emotions of childhood, and others,--makes Stevenson an admirable
critic of those social pretences that ape the native qualities of the
heart. The criticism on organised philanthropy contained in the essay on
_Beggars_ is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically, but is it
untrue?

'We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity.
In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it
is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are
all too proud to take a naked gift; we must seem to pay it, if in
nothing else, then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is
the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he
stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer,
if possible, than ever; that he has the money, and lacks the love
which should make his money acceptable. Here and now, just as of old
in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he
takes his pleasure: and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks
in vain for a recipient. His friends are not poor, they do not want;
the poor are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is he to
give? Where to find--note this phrase--the Deserving Poor? Charity
is (what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded,
with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes
merrily forward. I think it will take a more than merely human
secretary to disinter that character. What! a class that is to be in
want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from
strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the same time quite
devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate part of friendship,
and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the
face of all the laws of human nature:--and all this, in the hope of