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(c) Begging is hard worlt. If you don't believe it, •come and try it ! I and many of my officers have begged our food as religious mendicants, so that we; are able to speak from experience ! It is at best a life ' of sacrifice, hardship and suffering. And yet we have practised it under specially favorable circumstances, particularly those of us who are Europeans. But that there can be any sort of rest, or ease, or enjoyment in it to those who are driven to it by the pangs of hunger, unsupported by any spiritual consolations, I oannot conceive. Oil the contrary I should say that the task of the beggar is so hard, and disagreeable not to say shameful, that the majority of them would leap to do the most menial tasks that would deliver them from a bondage so painful.
Have you ever solicited help and been refused ? Have you known what it is to feel the awful sicken-ings of heart at hope deferred ? Have you known what it is to be regarded with suspicion, with contempt, with dislike, with scorn, or even with pity by your fellow men ? If so, you may be able to realise the experiences that every beggar has to go through a hundred times a day, many of them with feelings every bit as sensitive as your own. Will he demean himself and work hard at so miserable a calling and yet be unwilling to do some light work, with which he can earn an honest living ? I for one cannot believe it, till I see it.
(d) Our experience further contradicts it iu dealing with the more depraved, hardened and supposed-to-be-idle criminals and prostitutes, whom we receive into our Prison Gate and Rescue Homes. When Sir E. Noel Walker was visiting our Prisoners' Home iu
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