“As long as people will give to little children in the streets and to beggars at their doors, without the trouble of inquiring into their character and circumstances, so long shall we have a continual supply of juvenile criminals, and numbers of idle, worthless people, living on their wits, to the injury of honest industry, and the perversion of true views of charity. The polite heaps of rags that accost us at our doors and in the streets are, for the most part, tricksters in disguise. One little merry fellow, who has followed the begging trade for dissolute parents ever since I have been in Liverpool, and is particularly successful with the softer sex, will, sometimes, knowing that I am up to the secrets of his business, show me what he calls ‘the crying face,’ which, when necessary, he puts on to the ladies. He is a clever, sharp boy, but I have in vain endeavoured to reclaim him from his Arab life. It is far too profitable to his parents, and has become, I fear, too pleasant to himself. But to show the ill consequences of encouraging such lads--I was lately remonstrating with a man who lives near this family, because of an ungrateful and dishonest trick he had attempted to pass on a benevolent lady, when he said to me, as if the wholesale trickery of his neighbors justified his smaller practices--‘Why, there’s little Ned,’ referring to the boy in question, ‘he brings home every day more than any labouring man can earn, and sure we are worse off than they.’”