Note 75 — Volume III (continued 4)

To give to beggars, say some people, is to raise a nursery of thieves: though it is, on the contrary, to prevent their becoming such. I allow that the poor ought not to be encouraged to turn beggars; but, when once they are so, they ought to be supported, lest they should turn robbers. Nothing induces people to change their profession so much as their not being able to live by it: now those, who have once experienced the lazy life of a beggar, get such an aversion to work that they had rather go upon the highway, at the hazard of their necks, than betake themselves again to labour. A farthing is soon asked for and soon refused; but twenty farthings might provide a supper for a poor man, whom twenty refusals might exasperate to despair: and who is there who would ever refuse so slight a gift, if he reflected that he might thereby be the means of saving two men, the one from theft, and perhaps the other from being murdered? I have somewhere read that beggars are a kind of vermin, that hang about the wealthy. It is natural for children to cling about their parents; but the rich, like cruel parents, disown theirs, and leave them to be maintained by each other.