osition; it has been so blown upon
with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we
pay those who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of our
drinking-water; or those who daily predict the fall of Britain. We pay
them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And
truly there is nothing that can shake the conscience like a beggar's
thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be purchased for
a shilling, seems no scene for an honest man.

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars? And the answer is,
Not one. My old soldier was a humbug like the rest; his ragged boots
were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots were given him again
and again, and always gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was on
the road as usual, with toes exposed. His boots were his method; they
were the man's trade; without his boots he would have starved; he did
not live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste in the public,
which loves the limelight on the actor's face, and the toes out of the
beggar's boots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees: a false and
merely mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives, and
above all drinks, on the fruits of the usurpation. The true poverty does
not go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put a
penny in its hand. The self-respecting poor beg from each other; never
from the rich. To live in the frock-coated ranks of life, to hear
canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might suppose
that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it goes forward on a
scale so great as to fill me with surprise. In the houses of the working
classes, all day long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day long
there will be a knocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without
stint, hardly with intermission, from morning till night; and meanwhile,
in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of the rich
stand unsummoned. Get the tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was
always the poor who helped him; get the truth from any workman who has
met misfortunes, it was always next door that he would go for help, or
only with such exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the
course of the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters that he
trails his passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even
to the attics with his nasal song. Here