We regard it, therefore, as a matter of demonstra tion, that the earnings of beggars, as a class, are considerably below the earnings of the worst paid class of labourers.
With this conclusion, however, it is very compati ble to suppose, that individuals in the class of beg gars, those who havd more skill and industry than the rest, may attain to considerable gains ; as it is evidently an occupation in which a greater or less degree of skill in working upon the attention and sympathy of mankind mustimake a considerable dif ference. The greater you suppose the gains of these skilled individuals to be, the smaller, of course, must you suppose the number of those who make them.
7. We have now exhibited what appears to be the result of all the evidence yet before the public, re specting the actual state of mendicity. The infor mation is exceedingly imperfect, while it is certainly not very creditable. to the legislation of our country to be thus ignorant upon such a subject.
It remains for us to present what the existing state of information enables us to discover with re gard to the causes which operate in this, our own country, to the production of mendicity ; in the next place, to explain the effects which it is of the nature of mendacity to produce ; and, in the last place, to give a list of the operations which appear likely to be the most powerful in effecting a remedy,—the ob ject and end of the inquiry.
8. With respect to the causes of British mendicity, it will be useful, in the first place, to give what drop ped in detail from the witnesses before the Com mittee.
The cause of which they first begin to speak, is what we may call, in one word, soldiering, or the un favourable change produced in the•minds and in the circumstances, both of individuals and of families, When the individuals, or those on whom they depend, become soldiers. There is nothing to which the minds of the witnesses appear to be carried more than to this.
Edward Quin, Esq. a member of the establish , ment for-sending the poor Irish to their own country, speaking of the persons whom they send, declares : " Most of those parties have been, I should imagine nine out of twelve, either in the army or navy, and mostly with families, who have no means whatever of returning home, except, perhaps, a temporary pass, twopence a mile, or a penny a mile; we have known a man, with a wife and six children, coming from the Peninsula, sometimes with gd, or ls. or 2s. a-day." He makes a curious declaration with regard to the Irish, who are already begging in England. The es tablishment thinks it is better to have them in Eng land, as " to send them to Ireland, where there is no provision for them, would be doing them no good." Mr Colquhoun, the 'celebrated magistrate, and our grand instructor on the subject of police, being ask ed for his opinion of the causes of mendicity, said, " It does appear that there are various classes of men dicants, which are all pretty numerous : First, those that are beggars by profession, who are the imme diate objects of the attention of the police. Second ly, those that, from temporary pressure in the winter season, and other seasons when work is slack, or they have any special pressure upon them, fall into want, such as the wives and families of soldiers, when their husbands are abroad ; or when, from sickness, the head of the family is out of work, many of them have no resource but to ask alms in the streets ; that class is forced to do so from the inadequate allow ance the parishes can make them, partly arising from their not being parishioners, and arising also from the circumstance of the small sum the parishes can afford to allow, which seldom exceeds the weekly sum required for a miserable lodging. The next
class, I am sorry to say, are persons, and they are pretty numerous, who have allowances from Greenwich Hospital, or who are Chelsea pensioners; they carry on the trade of begging to a pretty considerable extent. Strangers wander up to town, of which there are a great number, in search of work, with their families, and are disappointed, in consequence of the scarcity of labour, from the supply being greater than the de mand ; which has been evident to me, and very much so, from attending the very unpleasant duty of ap peals against parish rates, and that discloses very often a great number o( people out of employ : a number of 'those who have been wandering up, as well as those stationary in town, do obtain some sub sistence, I apprehend, from begging. Those are all the different classes which occur to me at present." Mr Davis, the. agent by whom all persons taken up as beggars and vagrants in London and Middle sex, and passed to other counties, are conveyed, speaking of the difficulty of keeping them from run ning away, says,—" But the girls that come up with the soldiers are the worst we have ; down at Wool wich or at Greenwich, sometimes I. have a whole coach-load brought up at a time, some going one way, some another ; if it is possible to get away, they will. Some of them say, We must go out of your district, but we will not promise to go all the way home." The Edinburgh Society, also, for the suppression of beggars, say, in their first Report, " The widows, where not charity work-house cases were generally found burdened with families, fre: quently the widows of soldiers killed in battle. The married women were either old, or with families, their husbands being labourers out of employment, or soldiers abroad, many of whom had once enjoyed the county allowance as militiamen's wives, but who had been deprived of that resource in ctinsequence of their husbands having volunteered into regiments of the line. There seems some reason to apprehend that the allowance to the wives and families of mi litiamen is eradicating that pride which, with the lower in this country, made parish support disgraceful; and the resource only of the ut terly helpless and friendless." We shall not lengthen this article by pointing out, because they are obvious to all, the circumstances attached to soldiering, by which it necessarily be comes a great source of beggary. These instances are sufficient to prove the impression which,haa been made by the facts upon the minds of those who have been situated most favourably for observing them.