It was impossible for such a paradise to exist without its fame being blown to the most distant and out-of-the-way nooks of the town. North, west, and south the cadgers and impostors heard of it, and enviously itched to participate in the good things. And no wonder! Here was bread and meat and coals being furnished to all who asked for them, at the rate of twenty shillingsworth a-week at the least; nay, they were provided without even the asking for. It was unnecessary to cross the threshold of your door to look after them, for those whose happy task it was to distribute the prizes came knocking, and in the tenderest terms made offer of their assistance. All that was needful was to secure a lodging in Ragman’s-court or Little Grime’s-street, and pay your rent regularly, and sit down and await the result. And lodgings were so secured. It is positively true that at the height of the “famine season” at the East-end of London, when day after day saw the columns of the daily newspapers heavily laden with the announced subscriptions of the charitable, hundreds of questionable characters, “working men” in appearance, quitted other parts of the metropolis, and cheerfully paid much more rent than they had been accustomed to pay, for the privilege of squatting down in the midst of what was loudly and incessantly proclaimed to be “a colony of helpless out-o’-works, famine-stricken, and kept from downright starvation only by the daily and hourly efforts of the charitable.”
This much might of course be expected of the professed beggar and the cadger by education and breeding; but it would be interesting to learn how many shiftless ones—those semi-vagabonds who labour under the delusion that they are idle men only because work is denied them, and who are continually engaged in the vague occupation of “looking for a job”—gave way before the great temptation, and became downright cadgers from that time. With such folk the barrier to be broken down is of the flimsiest texture, and once overcome, it is difficult indeed to erect it again. Not sweeter to the industrious is the bread of their labour than to the idle and dissolute the loaf unearned, and the free gift of tobacco to be smoked at ease in working hours. It is terribly hard to struggle out of a slough of laziness in which a man has lain for a length of time, with nothing to do but open his mouth and permit other people to feed him. It is extremely unlikely that such a man would make the struggle while there remained but half a chance of his maintaining his comfortable position. Having grown so far used to the contamination of mire, he would be more likely to struggle a little deeper into it, if he saw what he deemed his advantage in doing so, and by swift degrees he would speedily be engulfed in that hopeless bog of confirmed beggary from which there is no return save those of the prison statician.