With respect to all these grinders, one thing is remarkable:  they are all, with the exception of a small savour of Irishmen, foreigners.  Scarcely one Englishman, not one Scot, will be found among the whole tribe; and this fact is as welcome to us as it is singular, because it speaks volumes in favour of the national propensity, of which we have reason to be proud, to be ever doing something, producing something, applying labour to its legitimate purpose, and not turning another man’s handle to grind the wind.  Yet there is, alas! a scattered and characteristic tribe of vagabond English music-grinders, and to these we must turn a moment’s attention ere we finally close the list.  We must call them, for we know no more appropriate name, cripple-grinders.  It is impossible to carry one’s explorations very far through the various districts of London without coming upon one or more samples of this unfortunate tribe.  Commerce maims and mutilates her victims as effectually as war, though not in equal numbers; and men and lads without arms, or without legs, or without either, and men doubled up and distorted, and blasted blind and hideous with gunpowder, who have yet had the misfortune to escape death, are left without limbs or eyesight, often with shattered intellects, to fight the battle of life, at fearful odds.  Had they been reduced to a like miserable condition while engaged in killing their fellow-creatures on the field of battle or on the deck of carnage, a grateful country would have housed them in a palace, and abundantly supplied their every want; but they were merely employed in procuring the necessaries of life for their fellows in the mine or the factory, and as nobody owes them any gratitude for that, they must do what they can.  And behold what they do:  they descend, being fit for nothing else, to the level of the foreign music-grinder, and, mounted on a kind of bed-carriage, are drawn about the streets of London by their wives or children; being furnished with a blatant hand-organ of last century’s manufacture, whose ear-torturing growl draws the attention of the public to their woful plight, they extort that charity which would else fail to find them out.  If there be something gratifying in the fact, that this is the only class of Britons who follow such an inglorious profession, there is nothing very flattering in the consideration, that even these are compelled to it by inexorable necessity.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Among some of the continental nations, Justice, though blind, is not supposed to be deaf; she has, on the contrary, a musical ear, and compels the various grinders of harmony to keep their instruments in tune, under the penalty of a heavy fine.  In some of the German cities, the police have summary jurisdiction in offences musical, and are empowered to demand a certificate, with which every grinder is bound to be furnished, shewing the date of the last tuning of his instrument.  If he perpetrate false harmony, and his certificate be run out, he is mulcted in the fine.  Such a by-law would be a real bonus in London.