As I am personally acquainted with a great number of street beggars, I find some weak attempts to have been made in one or two parishes to promote the wearing of badges; and my first question to those who ask an alms, is, Where is your badge? I have in several years met with about a dozen who were ready to produce them, some out of their pockets, others from under their coat, and two or three on their shoulders, only covered with a sort of capes which they could lift up or let down upon occasion.  They are too lazy to work, they are not afraid to steal, nor ashamed to beg; and yet are too proud to be seen with a badge, as many of them have confessed to me, and not a few in very injurious terms, particularly the females.  They all look upon such an obligation as a high indignity done to their office.  I appeal to all indifferent people, whether such wretches deserve to be relieved.  As to myself, I must confess, this absurd insolence hath so affected me, that for several years past, I have not disposed of one single farthing to a street beggar, nor intend to do so, until I see a better regulation; and I have endeavoured to persuade all my brother-walkers to follow my example, which most of them assure me they do.  For, if beggary be not able to beat out pride, it cannot deserve charity.  However, as to persons in coaches and chairs, they bear but little of the persecution we suffer, and are willing to leave it entirely upon us.

To say the truth, there is not a more undeserving vicious race of human kind than the bulk of those who are reduced to beggary, even in this beggarly country.  For, as a great part of our publick miseries is originally owing to our own faults (but, what those faults are I am grown by experience too wary to mention) so I am confident, that among the meaner people, nineteen in twenty of those who are reduced to a starving condition, did not become so by what lawyers call the work of GOD, either upon their bodies or goods; but merely from their own idleness, attended with all manner of vices, particularly drunkenness, thievery, and cheating.

Whoever enquires, as I have frequently done, from those who have asked me an alms; what was their former course of life, will find them to have been servants in good families, broken tradesmen, labourers, cottagers, and what they call decayed house-keepers; but (to use their own cant) reduced by losses and crosses, by which nothing can be understood but idleness and vice.

As this is the only Christian country where people contrary to the old maxim, are the poverty and not the riches of the nation, so, the blessing of increase and multiply is by us converted into a curse; and, as marriage hath been ever countenanced in all free countries, so we should be less miserable if it were discouraged in ours, as far as can be consistent with Christianity.  It is seldom known in England, that the labourer, the lower mechanick, the servant, or the cottager thinks of marrying until he hath saved