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In the late nineteenth century, anyone traveling on foot in an American city was likely to be accosted by a beggar asking for alms. Beggars had long been a familiar metropolitan sight, even in the New World. But, according to contemporaries, they were more commonplace in the years after the Civil War than ever before. With hands outstretched, they lined the streets, roved the parks, lingered on stoops.
By all accounts, the most vexing specimen was the sturdy beggar, a man in the prime of life telling a pitiful tale of need. Should he be believed? Would alms help him or sink him deeper in pauperism by teaching him that he need not labor to live? Puzzling over the subject, the writer William Dean Howells described his own encounter with a street beggar in New York City. In the urban sketch "Tribulations of a Cheerful Giver," he recounted being torn between the pulls of "conscience" and "political economy." In the "presence of want," Howells observed, "there is something that says to me, 'Give to him that asketh.' " But the question of alms was not so simple.
I have been taught that street beggary is wrong, and when I have to unbutton two coats and go through three or four pockets before I can reach the small coin I mean to give ... I certainly feel it to be wrong.
In the end, Howells confessed, he gave the beggar fifteen cents, without getting so much as a lead pencil in exchange. (1)
In following his conscience, Howells flouted the political economy of the marketplace. Such charitable transactions belonged to an antiquated world of paternal relations that were based on protection and dependence rather than competitive exchange--a world doomed, so Americans believed, by the Civil War and the destruction of slavery. For his lapse Howells suffered only misgivings. But if an officer of the law had witnessed the transaction, the beggar would have been subject to arrest and forced to labor in a jail or workhouse.
In itself, the problem of the beggar was nothing new. Tales of encounters with needy strangers reached back to the Bible, and tracts on the most economical way to deal with dependency appeared during the seventeenth century, alongside the first...