THE CHARITABLE BAZAARS OF DUBLIN.

It has been said by a classic authority, that force without judgment is overthrown by its own impetus; and the proposition is equally true of virtue. To do good to mankind is less facile than moralists suppose. It requires something more than a mere animal impulse; and there is much ground for doubting whether the world (at least the British world) does not suffer more from the impertinent interference of mistaken benevolence, than from the direct attacks of selfishness and malice on its order and happiness. Charity, more especially, (though, in a well ordered state, a duty whose exercise is limited within a narrow and comprehensible sphere,) becomes, under a government replete with abuses and fertile in factitious misery, a science requiring as much patient research, and as large a grasp of intellect, as any other department of politics. To be charitable on an extensive scale, is to legislate for the poor; and man, in his domestic capacity, (whatever may be thought of him as a citizen or a subject) is an animal made to think and to act for himself.

In the British empire, where every class of society is more or less dislocated, where the rewards of industry are subject to frequent revolutions, and where life is sustained by the most painful efforts, errors in the direction or energy of the charitable are doubly fatal. They are not only a waste of the scanty and insufficient resources of the multitudinous poor, a destruction of so much of the materials of happiness, but they are a direct and positive evil, deranging the economy of the lower orders, harassing them by needless and galling dictation, and destroying in their bosoms the principle of independence, without which there can be no virtue.

An high estimate of pecuniary charity in the scale of virtues is the result of incivilization, and a testimony of the barbarity of the governments where it prevails. Where the people are well governed and prosperous, the field for the exercise of this virtue is necessarily limited; but wherever great and terrible inequalities in human condition subsist, charity is a necessary supplement to the defective institutions, out of which they arise. In the christian world, where pecuniary liberality is dignified as a theological virtue, charity stands in the place of many more serviceable and important duties; and much of that energy which should be given to the improvement of the political and statistic condition of the country, is wasted in a vain attempt to bolster up bad systems, and to avert by eleemosynary efforts the miseries and vices accumulated by misrule. The high and influential classes are especially prone to fall into this error. Too moral and too religious to be satisfied with the wretchedness by which they are surrounded, yet too selfish, perverse, or indolent to attempt a thorough removal of its causes, they satisfy their consciences by attempting to relieve in detail the sufferings, which their privileges and pretensions produce in the gross; and when they have bestowed a small per centage of their overgrown fortunes upon the wretches whom their monopoly of power has impoverished and wronged, they flatter themselves that they have done all which human sympathy or divine injunction requires at their hands.

This description of charity has been well described by a popular writer, as “other-worldly-mindedness;” and no where is it more sensitive and alive than among the aristocracy of Ireland,—a country where mendicity is national, and where religious Quixotism is carried to the fever point of exaltation and excess. Unfortunately this fiery and rampant zeal is utterly deficient in knowledge; and there is more waste of money in the city of Dublin, more direct provocation of misery by ill-contrived attempts to relieve distress, more misdirected energy, than would, if properly applied, remove, ten times over, all the pauperism of a wholesomely constituted society of the same bulk.

In a country so teeming with an unemployed population as Ireland, it certainly is not an easy matter to give a proper direction to public feeling, and to avoid falling into dangerous errors; and though it is necessary to signalize the more flagrant and mischievous abuses, and to ridicule an all pervading folly, by which society suffers so deeply, yet it must be confessed that the individuals who come under the lash are not without some excuse. If their presumption and self-conceit are absurd and baneful, their intentions at least are often the purest and the best.

The sphere of charity, its productive power of good, being closely confined to the relief of those fortuitous evils to which the lower classes must ever be exposed, even in the best regulated societies, the moment it is applied to large categories of persons, as a remedy for permanent abuses, it becomes an unmanageable and equivocal agent of happiness, interfering with independent labour, disturbing its market, and rendering occupation precarious, and its reward fluctuating. The means which a nation possesses of employing its population are definite; and charity, in giving them a new direction, does not increase the sum: on the contrary, in as far as the process is forced and unnatural, it tends to diminish that sum by waste and mismanagement. Most of the charitable efforts which daily succeed each other for the employing the poor of Ireland, are but the pouring money out of one pocket, to place it in another; and if certain individuals are put to work in a new direction by the process, an equal number are inevitably thrown out of employment in some unobserved department.

This evil attaches with particular severity and mischievous effect to those associations of good and pious ladies, who either work themselves for the benefit of the poor, or find employment for them in charitable asylums, where they are enabled to under-sell and drive out of the market all competitors who are thrown upon their own resources. The money which is collected by the sale of needle and fancy work thus performed, is a direct robbery of the sempstresses, who, in garrets and in cellars, strive to exist by unwearied labour. The cheap repositories that vend articles of taste, fabricated in Magdalen asylums and receptacles for the destitute, not only severely injure the shopkeeper, who pays rent and taxes for the service of the public, but, through him, strikes despair into the bosom of a large class of helpless females, who avail themselves of accomplishments, acquired in happier circumstances, to support themselves in independence, by the only means which the perverse exclusion of women from their natural employments has left open to them. It is no justification of such establishments, that they sell only inutilities, calculated to catch a certain portion of loose cash, which otherwise would be lost to benevolence. The manufacture of inutilities, no less than that of articles of prime necessity, is the property of the working poor,—a property with which the public cannot tamper, without producing a certain evil, that is never compensated by the uncertain and delusive good expected from the process.

Among the many idle, delusive, and extravagant amusements, invented by that model of Grand Caliphs, Louis the XIVth, not the least remarkable were the shops opened in the saloons of Versailles, and kept by the king’s mistresses, or the princesses of the blood, attended by cavaliers, who, though officiating as shop-boys, were chosen according to their rank and office. In these magazines, toys, trinkets, and jewels of immense value, were distributed at counters, attended by the greatest beauties and most distinguished personages at the court; and if the cupidity of the courtiers found its account in this prodigality, coquetry lost nothing by the assumption of a character which added the naïveté of the bonne bourgeoisie to the graces of dignity and refinement. Madame de Maintenon dwells with emphasis on the fascinations of these illustrious shopkeepers, and the elegance which presided over their counters.

The bazaars, called charitable, which, for some successive seasons have been opened in Dublin, have in their details been modelled somewhat after the manner of these comptoirs of Versailles. The market is generally held in some very public place; either at the Rotunda, (a room consecrated to all public purposes,) or in an hotel or tavern. The stalls are raised on either side; the shops are kept by ladies of the highest rank in the Irish world of fashion and charity. The work disposed of is their own; their customers are the public at large, who are admitted on paying a shilling. The profits of the sale, of course, go to charity, sometimes at home—too often foreign,—the conversion of Jews, or the gathering of the stray sheep of Otaheite or Hindostan. The articles produced to extort the benevolence of the customer, address themselves rather to his charity than to his taste. They are multifarious; and if variety could compensate for want of ingenuity and of skill, there would be nothing to wish for in the bazaars of the charitable ladies of Dublin:—worsted stockings, to fit Irish giants,—bead purses, threaded by fairy fingers,—frizettes for the head, woven of horse-hair,—and slippers of hemp for the feet, as fatiguing as the tread-mill,—hearth-rugs as rugged “as a Russian bear,”—and pillows of lavender, not much smoother,—old jelly and stale cakes, which have figured at more than one tea and tract soirée,—and ornaments in every form, that can be produced by paste and paper, and daubed by paint,—from a pagoda to a pincushion,—of just that description which a woman of taste consigns to her housekeeper’s room, and the housekeeper, in turn, bestows on the still room, as fit for nothing but to preserve dust, and afford lurking places for spiders.

Meantime, if criticism looks on with her “eye malign askance,” in its lounge up the long line opened between the repositories of trash, there are many whose susceptibility supplies the place at once of taste and of charity, and the bazaar is the great resort of all the désœuvrés of one sex, and of all the saints of the other. Among the most distinguished of the first, are the military elegants of the garrison; among the latter, are some of the highest and prettiest of the aristocracy. Placed behind piles of pincushions, each having a moral in minikins stuck on its silken surface, or behind an outwork of paper screens, consecrated by the Lord’s prayer and the commandments, stands the fair trader, with a look, “sober, steadfast, and demure,” and an air of gentle solicitation, like that of the venders of royal effigies at the gate of the Tuileries, who cry, from morning till night, “Voyez, Messieurs, voyez la famille royale de France, et la Princesse Caroline, tous pour deux sous.”⁠[65]⁠

I was one day much amused by observing a little scene of this sort. The finest eyes I ever saw, were doing the honours of a charitable counter, to the very best of their ability. “A bonnes enseignes, bon vin.” A young and gallant hussar, whose attention had wandered from stall to stall, with undefined charity, was at last attracted by the “voyez, messieurs,” of the eyes alluded to. The petit commerce once begun, it was difficult to say which party threw most enterprize and speculation into the transaction. Fly-traps were shut and opened, with suitable comments on flies and traps; tablets were displayed, whose inscriptions were only to be breathed upon, to become, like good impressions, ineffacable; Adam and Eve, with the tempter in the tree, worked on a footstool in tent stitch, were not without allusion and edification; and the history of “Theresa Tidy” was recommended as a souvenir for absent sisters, with an air which proved that saints, as well as hussars, can be good disciplinarians. The choice was at length made. It fell upon a bunch of violets, reared by the fair hands of the vender for charitable purposes. The young hussar drew it from its vase, “all dripping with dew,” breathed its essence, looked full in the eyes of the belle jardinière, paid his sigh and his sovereign, and—was elbowed on by a new chapman, whose aid-de-camp’s uniform gave him superior claims on the attention of the charitable bazaarist.

As I left the door of Morrison’s tavern, where the scene passed, the young hussar stood waiting for his cab. A naked, shivering little girl, with a bunch of wallflowers (stuffed with grass “to make a show,”) in her dirty hands, came “between the wind and his nobility;” and with the usual supplicatory drawl of Irish mendicity, solicited his attention, according to its most approved formulary: “The Lord powr (pour) a blessing on your beautiful honour, Sir, and buy them iligant wallflowers for an half-penny from a fatherless orphant, that hasn’t broke her fast this day, God help her.” His “beautiful honour” heard her not, or valued not the liquid blessing of Heaven at the price the supplicant put upon it. He held his violets to his nose. His thoughts were behind the counter of the bazaar, and his foot on the step of his cab. After a moment’s hesitation, he returned to the bazaar, and the half-penny worth of wallflowers fell to my lot.

While ignorant benevolence, and mistaken charity, fancy they are serving the great cause of humanity, by promoting institutions which are, in fact, directly opposed to their laudable intentions, low cunning and self-love take advantage of the circumstance, by joining in a work which produces a temporary intimacy and equality between the little and the great. Many, who have no other means of getting on in society, find, in the charitable repositories, bazaars, and poor-shops, a means of introduction to its autocrats, (for even poor Dublin has its bel air) of acquaintance with the Countess of this, and the Marchioness of the other, the long desired object of all their struggles, hopes, and desires. Among a people essentially vain and ambitious, this sort of connexion draws in a vast number of subscribers, contributors, and labourers, to all schemes of mistaken benevolence, or quackish meddling; and the peculiar notions of the catholics, on the necessity of a constant practice of charity, complete the sums requisite for their mischievous success.

On the privations and sufferings inflicted on the respectable and laborious poor, by such interference with the branch of industry upon which they almost exclusively rely, it would be easy to say some eloquent things; for it is difficult to enter deeply and warmly into any subject, and not to treat of it effectually. There is no muse like being in earnest. But here is a little document, worth all that practised authorship could give on the subject, however deeply felt, or well studied. It is a letter from some poor sufferer, written in all the simplicity and integrity of conscious injury. I give it, with the too flattering letter in which it was inclosed, and which, (having received it this morning, March 29th, 1829,) directed my thoughts to the composition of this brief article. Having allied myself, from my earliest youth, to the oppressed party of my country, I have never enjoyed there but one distinction. The suffering and the unfortunate of all creeds have honoured me, by claims on my sympathy, which, alas! is frequently all I have to bestow; and I have, for many years back, been in the habit of receiving applications from the wretched, (a painful preeminence) which have included the details of almost every species of misery which flesh is heir to, from the despair of the condemned convict, who has written to me from his cell, to the indignant repinings of neglected genius, and the eloquent recital of “all the wrongs, which patient merit from the unworthy takes.”

But to the letter, and the simple statement of the distressed female, suffering from the ladies’ charitable bazaar, which I give exactly as I received it:—

“To Lady Morgan, Kildare-street, Dublin.

“Without presuming the Irish heart of your ladyship to be at all concerned in the pernicious custom!—the enclosed alludes to, it is very humbly submitted to your kind consideration—as one looked up to—as well in national pride—as the kindness of your disposition towards every individual of your country—and as it appears the press (the best medium of rectifying publick evils) will not receive it—your general opinion—of the mischief it records—may go far in serving—a class of poor individuals (your countrywomen) labouring under the hardship it details—and layd before your ladyship—by one of the oppressed sufferers—who has the honour to be,

“Your Ladyship’s

“Most obedient humble Servant,

“A Distressed Female.”

“Dublin, March 28th, 1829.”

“To the Ladies of the late Bazaar, and those generally of Dublin.

“Ladies:

“However painful in laying before you in this public manner evils brought on a numerous class of persons—through inadvertency and want of consideration (as hunger will break through stone walls) it is necessary, in addition to many hints you have already had laid before you, to now enter into a more particular detail of the misfortune visited on many, by your establishing bazaars and other shops, to be met with in many parts of Dublin, for the sale of ladies’ works; nor are you to suppose in doing so, it is intended to convey any idea of your not laudably working for yourselves or families, or contributing to such charities as you may desire to be interested in; but in doing so, permit me to say, you should put your hands in your pockets, and by no means interfere with the bread of others, as you manifestedly have done. You will please to recollect that besides the more common and industrious classes of society, there are many respectable, well educated females, reduced, from misfortune, and not fault, to the necessity of earning their bread by the work of their hands; inferior in taste, ingenuity, and acquirements, to none of their countrywomen! now thrown on the world for want of a usual emporium for the sale of their labour; wrought probably in filial piety for the humane and dutiful purposes of assisting an aged father or mother perishing in silent misery. For your bazaars, and from the glut of work they accumulate, prevent even shopkeepers from taking any off their hands, from the impossibility of disposing of it, as well as others purchasing those articles of taste and ingenuity, these unhappy people were wont to earn subsistence by. And really, ladies, where females are concerned, I would put it to your kind consideration, if it is consonant to the generous feelings of our soil, to thus open the floodgates of vice, as a probable mode of preventing starvation, encreasing female crime, and multiplying mendicity, in the current of misery and want.

“Our unfortunate country labours under the severe oppression of considerable absenteeism; but how despairingly must it indeed be felt, if those our residents, blessed with rank and fortune, lend their aid to increase distress in any part of the community, for the benefit of a good name; let the object be what it may, nothing can be called charity, that uncharitably takes bread from the mouths of many.

“And although excuses may be made for ladies of high consideration not being sufficiently acquainted, either with the nature of the trading world, or desperate state of the poor, none can, for those (some now holding titles) who have been indebted in a great measure for their present good fortune, to the benefit of fair trade, and support of the poor; swallowing Læthean drafts and standing behind a bazaar table, inflicting in the articles they sell, misery and want on several poor creatures, their countrywomen.

“Your last bazaar, it is understood, not only netted a considerable sum of money by what it sold, but has left a great quantity of ladies’ work yet to be disposed of; and which, notwithstanding the piety and charity of the worthy females concerned, is now at their desire, to be got rid of by a lottery; as well in the teeth of the acts of the legislature, as truly encouraging a species of gambling; as destructive a vice as ever (in its avaricious propensities) seized on the human heart; and this being under the description of little-go’s, becomes subject to magisterial interference. All this shews the quantity of work you ladies have set up against the poor and industrious fair trader, whose hands is his or her support, and which, evidently, you are not borne out in any interference with for any object whatsoever; or to lay the foundation of your charities, at the expense of the poor.

“And it is presumed, from the non-attendance of our gracious vice-queen at your bazaar, that though a stranger to our country, she has had that consideration in the benevolence of her heart, which, either through inadvertency or the fashion of the day, appears to have escaped yours. And believe the want of emporium for sale of female works, has occasioned much trouble to her grace, by many of those starving creatures who have had no other hope of trying to get their productions off their hands, has led them to seek that commiseration from the stranger, which they have failed to receive at home. So contrary is all this to the natural goodness of heart, so wound up in our national female character, that it is indeed with pain it is adverted to, and is only attributed to the immediate desire of doing good; having in the impulse of the moment, banished that more general, reflecting, and feeling consideration. Your hearts, when thus strongly appealed to, will, I am convinced, receive in the charity and benevolence, so characteristic in the fair daughters of Erin.

“Whose obedient servant I am,

“Penelope,

“Out of work.”

“Dublin, 23d March.

“Editor,” &c. &c. &c.

END OF VOL. I.