CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 53 



convinced me that my beggarly sympathies were a sin 

 against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine of 

 averages (so nattering to our free-will) persuasive with me ; 

 for as there must be in every year a certain number who 

 would bestow an alms on these abridged editions of the 

 Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota could make 

 no possible difference, since some destined proxy must 

 always step forward to fill my gap. Just so many mis 

 directed letters every year, and no more. Would it were as 

 easy to reckon up the number of men on whose backs fate 

 has written the wrong address, so that they arrive by 

 mistake in Congress and other places where they do not 

 belong ! May not these wanderers of whom I speak have 

 been sent into the world without any proper address at all? 

 Where is our Bead-Letter Office for such 1 And if wiser 

 social arrangements should furnish us with something of the 

 sort, fancy (horrible thought !) how many a working man s 

 friend (a kind of industry in which the labour is light and 

 the wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called 

 for in the office where he at present lies ! 



But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under 

 the lamp-post. The same Gano which had betrayed me 

 to him revealed to me a well-set young man of about half 

 my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see, as I was, 

 and with every natural qualification for getting his own 

 livelihood, as good, if not better, than my own. He had 

 been reduced to the painful necessity of calling upon me by 

 a series of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution 

 (for which, I own, he seemed rather young but perhaps 

 he referred to a kind of revolution practised every season 

 at Baden-Baden), continued by repeated failures in business, 

 for amounts which must convince me of his entire 

 respectability, and ending with our Civil War. During the 

 latter he had served with distinction as a soldier, taking a 

 main part in every important battle, with a rapid list of 

 which he favoured me, and no doubt would have admitted 

 that, impartial as Jonathan Wild s great ancestor, he had 

 been on both sides, had I baited him with a few hints of 



