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XIX. BROKEN REEDS.
149

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 persons 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.

114. 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