Almost every one
looks forward to the time when he can afford to be generous. And when he
is generous he likes to feel generous, and to have other people
sympathize with him. It's only human nature. A man can't be thinking
about himself all the time; he gets that tired feeling that your
scientific people in these days call altruism. It is an inability to
concentrate his mind on his own concerns. In spite of himself his
thoughts wander off to other people's affairs, and he has an impulse to
do them good. Now in my day it was the easiest thing in the world to do
good. The only thing necessary was to feel good-natured, and there you
were! Nowadays, the way of the benefactor is hard. It's so difficult
that I understand you actually have Schools of Philanthropy."

Scrooge shrugged his shoulders and seemed to shrivel at the thought of
these horrible institutions.

"Just fancy," he continued, "how I should have felt on that blessed
Christmas night, if, instead of starting off as an amateur angel,
feeling my wings growing every moment, I had been compelled to prepare
for an entrance examination. I suppose I should have been put with the
backward pupils whose early education had been neglected, and should
have had to learn the A B C's of charity. School of Philanthropy! Ugh!
And in the holidays, too!

"I have been visiting some elderly gentlemen who have had something of
my experience with the Spirit of Christmas. Like me, they were converted
somewhat late in life. They never were in as bad a way as I was, for I
did business, you may remember, in a narrow street with quite sordid
surroundings, while they were financiers in a large way. Yet I suppose
that they, too, were 'squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,
clutching, covetous old sinners,' though nobody had the courage to tell
them so. Then they got tired of clutching, and their hearts warmed and
their hands relaxed and they began to give. Never was such giving known
before. It was a perfect deluge of beneficence. A mere catalogue of the
gifts would make a Christmas carol of itself.

"But would you believe it, they never have got the fun out of it that I
got when I filled the cab full of turkeys and set out for Camden town.
The old Christmas feeling seems to have been chilled. The public has
grown critical. Instead of dancing for joy, it looks suspiciously at
the gifts and asks: 'Where did they get them?' It has been so impressed
by the germ theory of disease that it f