The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity has done more towards checking imposture, and bringing evildoers to punishment, than the Government itself, notwithstanding all the elaborate and expensive machinery at its command. Nor, by the way, is this a solitary instance of business peculiarly its own being shirked by the State, and handed over to be dealt with by the skill, energy, and perseverance of a few private individuals. A kindred association to that, the province of which is the better government of the beggars of London, is that which devotes its energies to the reclamation of returned convicts. Anyone at all acquainted with the matter is aware of the immense amount of lasting and substantial good that the “Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society” has accomplished. That the individuals chiefly concerned—the returned convicts themselves—fully appreciate the advantages held out by the said Society is sufficiently proved by the fact, that out of 368 licence-holders discharged into the metropolis, 290 placed themselves in its hands. No doubt such arrangements do prove as convenient as economical as regards the Government; but whether it is just to inflict a responsibility of such magnitude on private individuals is another question; or whether the easement it confers is cheaply purchased by our rulers at the cost of so unmistakable a confession of their incapacity.
So quietly and unobtrusively do these self-constituted guardians of public morality perform the arduous duties they undertake, that it may be safely assumed not one person in a thousand is aware what their prime objects are, let alone the means by which they are accomplished. As regards the Mendicity Society, there can be no doubt what is the popular impression. It is commonly regarded as a sort of amateur detective association for the discovery of fraudulent begging,—a Society that has in its employ certain cunning individuals of the detested breed of “spies,” who earn their wages by lurking in shady places, and peeping over men’s shoulders, and covertly listening to their private conversation. The full extent of the Society’s usefulness, according to vulgar prejudice, is represented by the unfortunate “cadger” pounced on in the act of receiving alms, and carried before a magistrate to account for that enormous iniquity. People, however, who know no more of the Society than this, know only of the smallest and least important of its functions. It is a poor’s-relief association on an extensive scale. It has its labour-sheds for testing the genuineness of the mendicants that apply at the office, to say nothing of a real treadmill of its own. Moreover it proclaims its ability to offer suitable employment to every able-bodied mendicant referred to it. The following is the Society’s method of dealing. The plan of the institution is to provide subscribers with tickets, which are intended to be distributed to street-beggars only, and which will insure admission to the Society’s office, where the applicant is examined by the sitting or assistant manager, who directs such immediate relief as in his judgment may appear proper.
If the applicant appears deserving, and is without lodging, money sufficient to procure one for the night is given. In cases where the applicant appears to have an immediate claim on any London parish, the pauper is referred to the overseers of such parish. If, as in some cases, it is requisite for the applicant to return on a subsequent day, he is furnished with a return-ticket, which introduces him again to the office for further relief. In the mean time inquiry is made, if practicable, into the character of the pauper, by which the sitting manager is governed in awarding proper relief. Men are sent to the Society’s premises to chop wood, and women and children to the oakum-room. During the time they are employed, men receive eightpence, and women fourpence per day, for lodging-money, and two meals, and one meal for each member of the family; and on Saturdays double allowance of money, with an extra meal to take home for each, that they may have no excuse for begging on Sunday. Each meal in winter consists of a pint of nutritious soup, and a sixth of a four-pound loaf of good bread; and in summer one quarter of a pound of cheese, and the same proportion of bread. At the end of a week, if they apply, the order for work may be renewed, until they have been employed a month, when the case is discharged, unless the sitting manager considers an extension of employment desirable; in which case it is laid before the committee, who renew the order for another month, or give such other relief as they think most likely to prevent the necessity of a recurrence to street-begging. In order to check repeated applications from the same persons, those who habitually resort to the refuges for the houseless, or the metropolitan workhouses, for lodging, and to the Society for food, if males, have to perform three hours’ work at the mill; if females, three hours’ work at oakum-picking, before food is given them; and the men may also, if practicable, have three days’ work at stone-breaking. Applicants of this description making more than six applications within one year are refused further relief, unless on investigation they are found deserving of assistance.
Persons who have not been six months in London are not considered objects of the charity; but food is given to persons passing through London in search of work, to assist them on their way. In the case of mendicants incapable of labour, the amount of daily allowance is 6d. for a single man, 9d. for a man, his wife, and young child, and 1s. in any other case; but this allowance may be doubled on Saturday night, at the discretion of the sitting or assistant-manager. Labourers at the mill receive 6d. per day, and the wife and children of persons employed may receive a meal. The wives of men employed either at the mill or stone-yard may also have work, and receive wages, provided that their joint earnings do not exceed one shilling per day.
The Society’s “Report” recently issued shows the kind and the extent of the business transacted through its officials up to the close of the year 1867. It contains much that is interesting as well as instructive, and not a little that is puzzling. We are informed that within the year 644 vagrants were arrested and taken before a magistrate, and that of this number 311 were committed, and 333 discharged. From the commencement to the close of the year 1867, upwards of 10,000 cases of “casual” relief passed through the hands of the Society, as well as between 400 and 500 cases that are alluded to as “registered”—a term, it may be assumed, that distinguishes the ordinary casual case from that which demands investigation and private inquiry. Amongst the whole number, 44,347 meals were distributed, and a considerable sum of money and some clothes; it being no uncommon occurrence for the management to rig-out the ragged, hard-up unfortunate applying for relief, and to start him in the world in a way that, if he has the intention, gives him a fair chance of recovering a decent position.
The most curious part of the affair, however, appears in the plain and simple tabulated statement that represents the yearly number of vagrants relieved and set to work, and consigned to proper punishment, since the time of the Mendicity Society’s first establishment. In the first year of the Society’s existence, when the scheme was new, and the vagrant crop dead-ripe for gathering, and the officers eager to get at their new and novel employment, 385 “sturdy beggars” were caught and sent to gaol. It is consoling to know that in the last year (1867) this number was decreased considerably, and that no more than 311 were sentenced. This may appear no vast reduction, but when we consider not only the enormously-increased population since 1818, and, what is of equal significance, the advance of intellect and cleverness and cunning amongst this as every other community doomed to live by the exercise of its wits, the result is one on which the country may be congratulated.
When, however, we come to regard the long column that at a glance reveals the figures that pertain to vagrant committals for fifty successive years, a decided damper is thrown on one’s hopes that the trade of the shiftless roving vagabond is becoming surely though slowly extinguished. As might be expected of a class so erratic in its movements, it would be difficult to measure them by any fixed standard; but one is scarcely prepared to discover the awful amount of uncertainty that prevails as regards the going and coming of these impostor tramps, when there is a dearth of them, and when their swarming may be expected. They are like cholera or plague, and have their seasons of sloth, and again of general prevalence and virulence. The laws that govern the movements of the professional beggar are inscrutable. You may make war on him and thin his ranks, and prosecute him and persecute him, and by the end of the year be able to show in plain unmistakable figures that he is not half the formidable fellow he was last year; that you have blunted his sting and decreased his dimensions. You still prosecute the war of extermination, and next year you are in a position to reveal in black-and-white further glorious results. The thousand has become seven hundred, and again the seven hundred four. At this rate, ere two more years are elapsed, you may strip the rags from your last beggar’s back, and hang them on the city gate as a scarecrow and a caution against a revival of the detestable trade.
But alas for our delusive hopes! Come another year—that which showed our seven hundred beggars dwindled down to four—and without any apparent cause the enemy, crippled and more than half killed as it seemed, reappears on the stage hale and sound, and with years of life in him yet. The four hundred has grown to six. There are no means of accounting for it. Depression of trade and poverty widely prevailing will not do so, for such are times of prosperity and fattening with the professional beggar. When “giving” is the order of the day, and benevolence, sickening at the sight of privation and distress that seems endless, shuts her eyes and bestows her gifts on all comers, then is the cadger’s harvest, then he may pursue his shameful avocation with comparative impunity. If we required evidence of this, it is furnished by the Society’s statistics. In 1865, which was an ordinarily fair year with the working man, the number of vagrant committals reached 586, while in the year following, when destitution prevailed so enormously, and the outcries of famine were so generously responded to through the length and breadth of the land, the number of begging impostors who got into trouble were only 372.
It will be as well, perhaps, that the reader should have set before him the figures for the various years precisely as they stand in the Society’s last issued Report. As will be seen, for some reason that is not explained, there are no returns for the four years 1830 to 1833 inclusive. Appended to the “committed vagrant list” is a record of the number of cases specially inquired into and “registered,” as well as a statement of the number of meals that were in each year distributed.