e than
any other; it is, of course, not without its sorrows, vicissitudes,
and troubles, but what section of the community is free from these
ills? This class has even a philosophy adapted to its circumstances,
the fundamental articles of which have been once for all summed up in
the lines of Burns:--

"Life is all a variorum;
We regard not how it goes,
Let them cant about decorum
Who have characters to lose."

What has just been said respecting the loafing, thieving vagabond
applies in a very great measure to the ordinary beggar. The habitual
beggar is a person who will not work. He hates anything in the shape
of regular occupation, and will rather put up with severe hardships
than settle down to the ordinary life of a working-man. It would be
easy to adduce instances to demonstrate the accuracy of what is here
stated. It would be easy to mention cases by the hundred, in which men
addicted to begging have been thoroughly fitted out and started in
life, but all to no purpose. Once a man fairly takes to begging, as a
means of livelihood, it is almost hopeless attempting to cure him.
After a time he loses the capacity for labour; his faculties, for want
of exercise, become blunted and powerless, and he remains a beggar to
the end of his days. It sometimes happens that the beggar who has
taken to mendicancy as a profession is obliged to go to the workhouse
as a kind of temporary refuge. This is not so frequent considering the
sort of life a vagrant has to lead; but when it does occur, the
labour-master of the Union very often finds it next to impossible to
got him to perform the task every able-bodied person is expected to
complete when taking shelter in a Casual Ward. As a result the
habitual beggar has sometimes to appear before the magistrates as a
refractory pauper, but a short sentence of imprisonment, which usually
follows, has lost all its terrors for him; he prefers enduring it to
doing the task allotted to him at the workhouse.

From this it will be seen that habits of indolence, and not the stress
of destitution, are responsible for a great deal of the begging which
goes on in England; but these habits are not answerable for the whole
of it. When times are bad begging has a decided tendency to increase,
and this arises from the fact that a considerable proportion of the
community possess wonderfully few resources within themselves. Even in
depressed times it is astonishing how well men who can tu