15

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
389

One person wholly unknown to me besought me for the modest sum of four
thousand dollars. She had seen a house that would exactly suit herself and
daughter for a home. It could be purchased for that amount and she implored
me to send her the money. Another wrote me setting forth the goodness of
Divine Providence in blessing me with great riches and beseeching me to
forward to her the price of a piano, assuring me that she had never before
troubled me for money. She knew that her daughter was remarkably gifted
in music and could make her way in the world if to start with she could only
have a piano. These were no doubt honest people and applied to me confidently
expecting to get the money for which they asked. They were not of
that class or professional beggars who hide away in garrets, cellars and other
out of the way places and load the mails with ingeniously framed begging
letters to persons known to have means and supposed to be benevolent, and
upon whom they think they can impose. They are however of that large class
or persons who are perfectly willing to subsist at other people's expense.
Happily, the speculators in human credulity generally reveal the presence of
fraud by their elaborate and overdrawn tales of woe and suffering and thus
defeat themselves. The witness who gives evidence merely from memory
and not from the knowledge of the case then present to his mind, may tell a
straight story, but one not so straight will often better secure belief. The skillful
lawyer can generally detect in the perfection of the story the vice of the
evidence.

Among the most numerous and persistent beggars whom I have to
encounter in this class are those who come in the character of creditors to
demand from me the payment of a debt which I especially owe them for the
great services which they or their fathers or grandfathers have rendered to
the cause of emancipation. "They have assisted slaves in their flight from
bondage." "They have travelled miles to hear me lecture." "They remember
some things which they heard me say." "They read everything that I ever
wrote." "Their fathers kept stations on the underground railroad." "They
voted the Liberty Party ticket many years ago, when no one else did,'' and
much else of the same sort, but always concluding with a solid demand for
money or for my influence to get positions under the Government for themselves
or for their friends. Though I could not exactly see how or why I
should he called upon to pay the debt of emancipation for the whole four
millions of liberated people, I have always tried to do my part as opportunity
has offered. At the same time it has seemed to me incomprehensible that they
did not see that the real debtors in this woeful account are themselves and
that the absurdity of their posing as creditors did not occur to them.