SEVENTY DOLLARS A WEEK BY BEGGING.
An American writer has made an interesting study of street-begging from the standpoint of a beggar. Assuming the garb of a mendicant, he put his arm in a sling well saturated with carbolic acid, partly for its appeal to sympathy, partly to expell the undesirable tenants of his raiment, and started out in business for a week. In seven days of begging he collected seventy dollars, averaging 5s. 2½d. sterling an hour for the actual time employed. For the purpose of his investigation he selected all sorts of districts. He estimated that, if he had confined himself to the best-paying fields, he could easily have averaged twenty dollars a day of eight hours. Following the cue given him by a “beggar friend,” he solicited only those men who seemed to be strangers, but accosted women indiscriminately. In the “millionaire districts” he got the least, in the “tenement districts,” the most. The proportion of givers was, among the poorest, six in twelve; among the middling rich, four in twelve; among the richest, two in twelve. From out-of-town sight-seers he got twice as much as from city women shoppers. He found that begging from house to house pays five times better than begging on a street corner, yet the “stander,” not the traveler, gets rich: the reason being that the stander works without intermission. He found that as a rule “a stander beggar has at least a comfortable home, that his rent is paid promptly, his meals are good, he has a wife and children, he makes and receives calls, and in many cases has a savings-bank account of generous dimensions; some of them are even owners of realty.” From six to ten thousand persons in New York he estimates as in the business of begging. The magistrates commit many, but when released they go at it again. The pathetic side of the story is the plundering of the sympathetic, but ignorant, poor. The instructive side of it is the certainty of debauching manhood by “charity” to beggars.