e poor;
public money will be wasted in defraying their expenses and in printing
reports; resolutions will be passed; something will be said about it
in the House of Commons; and, in a few weeks, after resolving and
re-resolving, it is as little thought of, as if it had never been the
subject of investigation. In the meantime the evil proceeds--becomes
more inveterate--eats into the already declining prosperity of the
country--whilst those who suffer under it have the consolation of
knowing that a Parliamentary Committee sat longer upon it than so many
geese upon their eggs, but hatched nothing. Two circumstances, connected
with pauperism in Ireland, are worthy of notice. The first is this--the
Roman Catholics, who certainly constitute the bulk of the population,
feel themselves called upon, from the peculiar tenets of their religion,
to exercise indiscriminate charity largely to the begging poor. They act
under the impression that eleemosynary good works possess the power of
cancelling sin to an extent almost incredible. Many of their religious
legends are founded upon this view of the case; and the reader will find
an appropriate one in the Priest's sermon, as given in our tale of the
"Poor Scholar." That legend is one which the author has many a time
heard from the lips of the people, by whom it was implicitly believed.
A man who may have committed a murder overnight, will the next day
endeavor to wipe away his guilt by alms given for the purpose of getting
the benefit of "the poor man's prayer." The principle of assisting our
distressed fellow-creatures, when rationally exercised, is one of the
best in society; but here it becomes entangled with error, superstition,
and even with crime--acts as a bounty upon imposture, and in some degree
predisposes to guilt, from an erroneous belief that sin may be cancelled
by alms and the prayers of mendicant impostors. The second point, in
connection with pauperism, is the immoral influence that I proceeds
from the relation in which the begging poor in Ireland stand towards the
class by whom they are supported. These, as we have already said,
are the poorest, least educated, and consequently the most ignorant
description of the people. They are also the most numerous. There have
been for centuries, probably since the Reformation itself, certain
opinions floating among the lower classes in Ireland, all tending to
prepare them for some great change in their favor, arising from
the d