"It´s worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seems to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary ‘working’ men. They are a race apart – outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men ‘work’, beggars do not ‘work’; they are parasites, worthless in their nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.
Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar´s livelihood and that of a numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other, quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicine, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire purchase tout – in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern man the right to despise him.
Then the question arises. Why are beggars despised? – for they are despised universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other business man, in the way that comes to hand. Ha has not, more than most modern people, sold is honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at wich it is impossible to grow rich."



"One´s only excitement was the periodical tea-and-two-slices. I do not know how many man are living this life in London – it must be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, it was actually the best life he had know for two years past. His interludes for tramping, the times when he had somehow laid hands on a few shillings, had all been like this; the tramping side had been slightly worse. Listening to his whimpering voice – he was always whimpering when we was not eating – one realised what torture unemployment must be to him. People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils in poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nomsense to pretend that those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pitty is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind."

Gerorge Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, publicado em 1933