COLLECTING MONEY.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 1012, 15 December 1881, Page 3

COLLECTING MONEY.

When two young ladies of prepossessing manner and appearance enter your office, your drawing-room, or your consulting-room, and, in winsome tones, ask you for a subscription to some charity in which you do not take the remotest interest, it is difficult sometimes to know what to do. The simplest way out of the difficulty, of course, is to give the guinea they demand, and politely dismiss them. But you are not always in the mood for giving ; besides, you may not have a guinea about you, and your banking account may be overdrawn. Now, a surly man, under these circumstances, bluntly refuses, and probably tells the young ladies he wishes they -were better employed than going about begging. But all the world is not surly, and, moreover, surly men are generally rich men, and, conversely, men who are not surly are mostly poor. Their poverty, in fact, is the concomitant, if not the consequence, of their amiability. The straits therefore to which a good-natured ma >, short of money, is driven, when called upon io stand and deliver by two lovely high-way-women, are indescribably distressing. If he should say he has lost his cheque-book, the collectors will be too happy to call again—say to-morrow, or the day after to-morrow. If lie knows the young ladies personally, he is worse off still , for he is told he can send the cheque to them. If he objects conscientiously to the purpose for which the money is being collected he is driven into u:i argument, and, of course, his*opponents being lovely and therefore irresis able, he gets the worst of it. If he promises he will think about it, he only prolongs his misery ; he will be sure to be solicited again. His good-nature makes it certain he will be a victim in the end. The matter is different, of course, when the applicants are old and ugly. Even a good-natured man will have no compunction in refusing them. It does not make him unhappy, as he shows them to the. door, to think he has disappointed them ; in fact, it is rather a source of pleasure to him. It is a proper punishment for their presumption for believing him weak enough to be influenced by such unattractive persons. If they commence to argue with him, he can tell them that customers, or clients, or patients, are waiting for him. But the question may be asked, is it not taking an unfair, if not a mean, advantage of a man to attack him with beauty, grace, and sweetness, and to compel him to give, not out of sympathy with the object for which he is-asked to give, but as an expression of his admiration of the pretty beggars who know his weak ness ? And it may be further asked, how much of the many large sums occasionally raised by subscription is due to benevolence, and how much to a disposition to oblige those who collect it ?