_5thly._ _On Mendicancy_—“Whenever relief is provided for the destitute, mendicancy may be suppressed. A law which says, ‘You shall not beg or steal, but you shall starve,’ would be contrary to natural justice, and would be disobeyed; but if the law first makes provision for the destitute, and then says, ‘You shall not beg, but you shall be relieved at the public charge,’ the alternative thus offered will entitle the community to suppress a practice which is held to be injurious. On these grounds, I think the law which establishes a system of public relief for destitution, should at the same time prohibit mendicancy. The present state of Ireland however, and the habits and feelings of the Irish people, throw considerable difficulty in the way of an immediate suppression of mendicancy. The number of mendicants is very great, and they are therefore of some importance as a class, and support and keep each other in countenance whilst following, what they consider, no disreputable vocation. They enter the cottages of the peasantry as supplicants, it is true, but still with a certain sense of right; and the cottager would be held to be a bold, if not a bad man, who resisted their appeal. In fact, the appeal never is resisted,—if there is only a handful of potatoes, they are divided with the beggar; and there is thus perhaps levied from the produce of the soil in Ireland for the support of mendicancy, as large a contribution as it is now proposed to raise by an assessment of property for the relief of destitution. The ‘sturdy beggars,’ noticed in the _14th of Elizabeth_, must have been very similar to those now common in Ireland. Indeed the state of society at the two periods seems to have been nearly the same in both countries, the prevalence of begging in each being accompanied by the same general disposition to give, and this disposition of course increasing the number of beggars.