“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 turn their hand, as it is called, can manage to live.  Men of this stamp are not beaten and rendered helpless by the misfortune of losing their usual employment; they are capable of devising fresh methods of earning a livelihood; they are persistent, persevering, energetic; they are not content to stand by with their hands in their pockets and their back at the wall; at times they even create an occupation, and devise new wants for the community.  Such men exist in large numbers among the working population, and are able to tide over periods of slackness and depression in a truly admirable way.  But there are others who are utterly lost the moment trade ceases to flourish.  As soon as they lose the job they have been accustomed to work at they at once sink into a condition of complete helplessness; knowing not