cripple whose utmost industry has but
served to save himself from parish relief, and a giddy girl without a
sixpence, and you ask me to accept these very equivocal tenants instead
of substantial ones, and at a rent one-third less than the market value.
Suppose that I yielded to your request, what becomes of my reputation
for practical, business-like justice? I shall have made an inroad into
the system by which my whole estate is managed, and have invited all
manner of solicitations on the part of friends and neighbours, which I
could no longer consistently refuse, having shown how easily I can be
persuaded into compliance by a stranger whom I may never see again. And
are you sure, after all, that, if you did prevail on me, you would do
the individual good you aim at? It is, no doubt, very pleasant to think
one has made a young couple happy. But if that young couple fail in
keeping the little shop to which you would transplant them (and
nothing more likely: peasants seldom become good shopkeepers), and find
themselves, with a family of children, dependent solely, not on the arm
of a strong labourer, but the ten fingers of a sickly cripple, who makes
clever baskets, for which there is but slight and precarious demand in
the neighbourhood, may you not have insured the misery of the couple you
wished to render happy?"

"I withdraw all argument," said Kenelm, with an aspect so humiliated and
dejected, that it would have softened a Greenland bear, or a Counsel for
the Prosecution. "I am more and more convinced that of all the shams in
the world that of benevolence is the greatest. It seems so easy to
do good, and it is so difficult to do it. Everywhere, in this hateful
civilized life, one runs one's head against a system. A system, Mr.
Travers, is man's servile imitation of the blind tyranny of what in our
ignorance we call 'Natural Laws,' a mechanical something through which
the world is ruled by the cruelty of General Principles, to the utter
disregard of individual welfare. By Natural Laws creatures prey on each
other, and big fishes eat little ones upon system. It is, nevertheless,
a hard thing for the little fish. Every nation, every town, every
hamlet, every occupation, has a system, by which, somehow or other, the
pond swarms with fishes, of which a great many inferiors contribute to
increase the size of a superior. It is an idle benevolence to keep
one solitary gudgeon out of the jaws of a pike. Here am I doing what I