It is curious to find preconceived notions quite

It is curious to find preconceived notions quite upset in a review of the
nationalities that go to make up this squad of street beggars. The Irish head
the list with fifteen per cent., and the native American is only a little way
behind with twelve per cent., while the Italian, who in his own country turns
beggary into a fine art, has less than two per cent. Eight per cent. were
Germans. The relative prevalence of the races in our population does not
account for this showing. Various causes operate, no doubt, to produce it.
Chief among them is, I think, the tenement itself. It has no power to corrupt
the Italian, who comes here in almost every instance to work —no beggar
would ever emigrate from anywhere unless forced to do so. He is distinctly on
its lowest level from the start. With the Irishman the case is different. The
tenement, especially its lowest type, appears to possess a peculiar affinity for
the worse nature of the Celt, to whose best and strongest instincts it does
violence, and soonest and most thoroughly corrupts him. The “native” twelve
per cent. represent the result of this process, the hereditary beggar of the
second or third generation in the slums.
The blind beggar alone is winked at in New York’s streets, because the
authorities do not know what else to do with him. There is no provision for
him anywhere after he is old enough to strike out for himself. The annual
pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives from the city serves to
keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest his misfortune and his thin
disguise of selling pencils on the street corners must provide. Until the city
affords him some systematic way of earning his living by work (as
Philadelphia has done, for instance) to banish him from the street would be
tantamount to sentencing him to death by starvation. So he possesses it in

peace, that is, if he is blind in good earnest, and begs without “encumbrance.”
Professional mendicancy does not hesitate to make use of the greatest of
human afflictions as a pretence for enlisting the sympathy upon which it
thrives. Many New Yorkers will remember the French schoolmaster who was
“blinded by a shell at the siege of Paris,” but miraculously recovered his sight
when arrested and deprived of his children by the officers of Mr. Gerry’s
society. When last heard of he kept a “museum” in Hartford, and acted the
overseer with financial success. His sign with its pitiful tale, that was a
familiar sight in our streets for years and earned for him the capital upon
which he started his business, might have found a place among the curiosities
exhibited there, had it not been kept in a different sort of museum here as a
memento of his rascality. There was another of his tribe, a woman, who
begged for years with a deformed child in her arms, which she was found to
have hired at an almshouse in Genoa for fifteen francs a month. It was a good
investment, for she proved to be possessed of a comfortable fortune. Some