Mendicancy.

Mendicancy. In spite of the stringency of the laws against vagrancy and begging, and the numerous aid societies in every town in Britain for the relief of the poor and unemployed, quite an army of men, women, and children wander from place to place, and pick up a living from the thoughtless benevolence of their better-off and more industrious neighbours. This class is largely recruited from the lazy, idle, drunken, and vicious, though there is always a certain percentage who are really the victims of misfortune. Though the law is against begging—English statutes for the repression of mendicancy date from the 14th century—there is no law against giving to beggars. But indiscriminate charity only feeds the evil it seeks to remove, and the weak-willed, shiftless population continues to be a problem to the benevolent. The truest charity consists in helping people to help themselves, and those societies and individuals are most useful that aid the fallen to gain work and self-respect, and so rise in the social scale. There are no fewer than 83 societies in Great Britain for improving the condition of the poor, 42 of which are in London and 11 in Scotland. The relief given may consist in supplying immediate necessities, helping the poor into hospitals and convalescent homes, to emigrate, or to secure temporary work. Tickets are in some cases supplied to subscribers, which entitle the party to whom they are given to one meal. Tickets for a night's shelter can also be had, to be given instead of money. The Mendicity Society in London (established for the suppression of public begging in 1818), whose work has been much aided by the Charity Organisation Society (see CHARITIES), has caused some 25,000 vagrants to be convicted as impostors, and relieves some 13,000 or 14,000 cases in a year. A police census of December 23, 1888, credited Edinburgh, in a population of a little over a quarter of a million, with 898 common beggars and tramps; of whom 589 were Scotch, 210 Irish, 83 English, and 16 foreigners. In London it is calculated that one in thirty of the inhabitants live on charity; in Paris, where there is a well-organised syndicate of professional mendicants, one in eighteen (see Chambers's Journal, 1890). Mr Booth estimated that there were 3,000,000 persons in England who could not live for a week on their own resources, including 100,000 homeless waifs, sleeping on or under bridges, and hedgerows, carts, &c., and for them he devised the scheme of rescue propounded in his In Darkest England (1890). See also POOR-LAWS, VAGRANTS.