"Hunger is a sharp thorn, and biteth keen."
"I cannot get work, and to beg I am ashamed."
I have known them by this means obtain seven shillings a day.
'Cadgers' Sitting Pad.—Whenever cadgers stand or sit, either in towns or by the road side, to beg, they call it sitting or standing pad; and this often proves a very profitable method. Some of them affect blindness; whilst others represent themselves as unable to follow any employment, in consequence of being subject to fits. Some cadgers save very considerable sums of money; but these are very few, compared with the great number who live by this trade of beggary.
'Match-sellers' never entirely depend upon selling matches, for they cadge as well; in fact, they only carry matches as a cloak for begging, and never offer them at any house where they expect to get more without them.... Match-sellers, as well as all other cadgers, often get what they call 'a back-door cant;' that is, anything they can carry off where they beg, or offer their matches for sale.'
'Cross Coves,' though they beg their bread, can tell a long story about being out of employ through the badness of trade, &c., yet get what they call on the cross, (by theft.).... One of their chief modes of getting things on the cross is by shoplifting, (called grabbing,).... Another method is to star the glaze, (i. e. break or cut the window.)
'Prigs (or pickpockets) are another class of vagrants, and they frequent races, fairs, and prize-fights.... Like cross coves, they are generally young men who have been trained to vagrancy, and have been taught the arts of their profession in their childhood.'
'Palmers are another description of beggars, who visit shops under pretence of collecting harp half-pence; and to induce shopkeepers to search for them, they offer thirteen-pence for a shilling's worth, when many persons are silly enough to empty a large quantity of copper on their counters to search for the half-pence wanted. The palmer is sure to have his hand amongst it; and while he pretends to search for the harps, he contrives to conceal as many as possible in the palm of his hand, and whenever he removes his hand from the coppers on the counter, always holds his fingers out straight, so that the shopkeeper has not the least suspicion that he is being robbed. Sums varying from five to fifteen shillings per diem are frequently got in this way, by characters of that description.'
Extract from Edinburgh Review, Jan. No. 1844:
IRISH PEASANTRY.
It is obvious that the insecurity of a community in which the bulk of the population form a conspiracy against the law, must prevent the importation of capital; must occasion much of what is accumulated there to be exported; and must diminish the motives and the means of accumulation. Who will send his property to a place where he cannot rely on its being protected? Who will voluntarily establish himself in a country which to-morrow may be in a state of disturbance? A state in which, to use the words of Chief Justice Bushe, 'houses, and barns, and granaries are leveled, crops are laid waste, pasture lands are ploughed, plantations are torn up, meadows are thrown open to cattle, cattle are maimed, tortured, killed; persons are visited by parties of banditti, who inflict cruel torture, mutilate their limbs, or beat them almost to death; men who have in any way become obnoxious to the insurgents, or opposed their system, or refused to participate in their outrages, are deliberately assassinated in the open day; and sometimes the unoffending members of a family are indiscriminately murdered by burning the habitation." A state in which even those best able to protect themselves, the gentry, are forced to build up all their lower windows with stone and mortar; to admit light only into one sitting-room, and not into all the windows of that room, to fortify every other inlet by bullet proof barricadoes; to station sentinels around during all the night, and the greater part of the day; and to keep fire-arms in all the bedrooms, and even on the side-table at breakfast and dinner time. Well might even Bishop Doyle exclaim—"I do not blame the absentees; I would be an absentee myself if I could."