Letter 19.

The General Pressure of Excessive and Improper Work

in English Life.

April 10, 1867.

I CANNOT go on to-day with the part of my subject I had proposed, for I was disturbed by receiving a letter last night, which I herewith enclose to you, and of which I wish you to print, here following, the parts I have not underlined:

MY DEAR R

1, PHENE-STREET, CHELSEA, April 8, 1867. It is long since you have heard of me, and

now I ask your patience with me for a little. I have but just re

the first

For years

turned from the funeral of my dear, dear friend artist friend I made in London-a loved and prized one. past he had lived in the very humblest way, fighting his battle of life against mean appreciation of his talents, the wants of a rising family, and frequent attacks of illness, crippling him for months at a time, the wolf at the door meanwhile.

But about two years since his prospects brightened * * * and he had but a few weeks since ventured on removal to a larger house. His eldest boy of seventeen years, a very intelligent youth, so strongly desired to be a civil engineer that Mr. not being

able to pay the large premium required for his apprenticesh p, had been made very glad by the consent of Mr. Penn, of Milwall, to receive him without a premium after the boy should have spent some time at King's College in the study of mechanics. The rest is a sad story. About a fortnight ago Mr. was taken ill, and died last week, the doctors say, of sheer physical exhaustion, not thirtynine years old, leaving eight young children, and his poor widow expecting her confinement, and so weak and ill as to be incapable of effort. This youth is the eldest, and the other children range downwards to a babe of eighteen months. There is not one who knew him, I believe, that will not give cheerfully, to their ability, for his widow and children; but such aid will go but a little way in this painful case, but it would be a real boon to this poor widow if some of her children could be got into an Orphan Asylum. * If you are able to do anything I would send particulars of the age and sex of the children.

I remain, dear sir, ever obediently yours,

FRED. J. SHIELDS.

P.S.-I ought to say that poor

has been quite unable to

save, with his large family; and that they would be utterly destitute now, but for the kindness of some with whom he was professionally connected.

Now this case, of which you see the entire authenticity, is, out of the many, of which I hear continually, a notably sad one only in so far as the artist in question has died of distress while he was catering for the public

amusement. Hardly a week now passes without some such misery coming to my knowledge; and the quantity of pain, and anxiety of daily effort, through the best part of life, ending all at last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in England are now suffering, is so great that I feel constantly as if I were living in one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into them, out of sight.

Now I want you to observe here, in a definite case, the working of your beautiful modern political economy of "supply and demand." Here is a man who could have "supplied" you with good and entertaining art—say for fifty good years-if you had paid him enough for his day's work to find him and his children peacefully in bread. But you like having your prints as cheap as possibleyou triumph in the little that your laugh costs—you take all you can get from the man, give the least you can give to him—and you accordingly kill him at thirty-nine; and thereafter have his children to take care of, or to kill also, whichever you choose: but now, observe, you must take care of them for nothing, or not at all; and what you might have had good value for, if you had given it when it would have cheered the father's heart, you now can have no return for at all, to yourselves; and what you

give to the orphans, if it does not degrade them, at least afflicts, coming, not through their father's hand, its honest earnings, but from strangers.

Observe farther, whatever help the orphans may receive, will not be from the public at all. It will not be from those who profited by their father's labours; it will be chiefly from his fellow-labourers; or from persong whose money would have been beneficially spent in other directions, from whence it is drawn away to this need, which ought never to have occurred-while those who waste their money without doing any service to the public, will never contribute one farthing to this distress. Now it is this double fault in the help-that it comes too late, and that the burden of it falls wholly on those who ought least to be charged with it, which would be corrected by that institution of overseers of which I spoke to you in the twelfth of these letters, saying, you remember, that they were to have farther legal powers, which I did not then specify, but which would belong to them chiefly in the capacity of public almoners, or helpgivers, aided by their deacons, the reception of such help, in time of true need, being not held disgraceful, but honourable; since the fact of its reception would be sc entirely public that no impostor or idle person could ever obtain it surreptitiously.

(11th April.) I was interrupted yesterday, and I an glad of it, for here happens just an instance of the way in which the unjust distribution of the burden of charity is reflected on general interests; I cannot help what taint of ungracefulness you or other readers of these letters may feel that I incur, in speaking, in this instance, of myself. If I could speak with the same accurate knowledge of any one else, most gladly I would; but I also think it right that, whether people accuse me of boasting or not, they should know that I practise what I preach. I had not intended to say what I now shall, but the coming of this letter last night just turns the balance of the decision with me. I enclose it with the other; you see it is one from my bookseller, Mr. Quaritch, offering me Fischer's work on the Flora of Java, and Latour's on Indian Orchidacea, bound together, for twenty guineas. Now, I am writing a book on botany just now, for young people, chiefly on wild flowers, and I want these two books very much; but I simply cannot afford to buy them, because I sent my last spare twenty guineas to Mr. Shields yesterday for this widow. And though you may think it not the affair of the public that I have not this book on Indian flowers, it is their affair finally, that what I write for them should be founded on as broad knowledge as possible; whatever value my own book