This Ancient Disease...

Near our house is a street where traffic is heavy, and beggars are at home in it, for they have learned by experience the advantage of stationing themselves there. Among them is a woman who has made it her permanent seat: she squats on one of its two narrow sidewalks and displays to the passersby two children reeking of filth and stench, the younger set in her lap and the other laid out before her on the pavement — thereby blocking the passersby's way and forcing them to swerve aside whenever they pass her.

The woman is free of any infirmity or disease — except a double, deadly disease that preys upon her and keeps her from work: the disease of ignorance and sloth, which has clothed her in a squalor that revolts the soul, and driven her to contrive her living by degrading herself and degrading her two children in this fashion.

Why does this woman beg? It is probable that she has a husband she lives with, for last year she had one child and now she has two; the husband, then, is the first responsible for this condition of hers. As for her ignorance and her sloth — the two chief causes driving her to beggary — who, pray, is responsible for them? You will say: our poverty in schools and in trade training; had the woman been less ignorant, she would not have been drawn down to this depth.

But if she is a refugee, then we blame those in authority who allow swarms of this parasitic, exasperating breed to seep into the country — and above all into its capital, which is all but choking with inhabitants.

As for the other responsible parties, who deserve the sharpest blame and carry the weightiest part of the responsibility, they are the passersby — the simple-minded inhabitants of the capital who give to beggars out of desire for the heavenly reward, and encourage women like this one to practice this disgraceful trade.

We may forgive the blind and the maimed their descent into the trade of beggary, so long as the government neglects to establish a shelter for the disabled. But how can the people of Beirut — most of them people of culture — give to a woman capable of work? How can they encourage her — her and her husband — to exploit her children in this fashion, forcing them to lie on the flagstones of the sidewalk the whole day long, without movement, in cold and in heat, with no cover to shield them and no bedding to hold them? And what are we to expect in the future from children such as these, who lie motionless on the pavement, dead in the likeness of the living? And what a crime against children is committed by those who give to the criminal mother — she who ought to have worked to feed them and shelter them in home or school, instead of pasturing them on the sidewalk of the street!

No less ignorant than the almsgiving passersby are those schoolmasters and schoolmistresses who encourage beggary by making pupils eager to give charity to beggars, setting them stale, threadbare composition subjects such as this: "I found a poor beggar stretching out his hand in supplication. What did I do for him? How did I help him and lighten his affliction?"

Do these teachers not know that they thereby encourage parasitism, abjection, baseness of soul, and dependence — all those diseases we ought to be fighting? Do they not know that charity in this form does not solve the problem of poverty, but is like curing a disease with a disease worse than it? Almsgiving to beggars increases poverty and dependence; it is like the sedative that soothes the pain for a while only to increase it when its effect has passed. It is an old, threadbare method of treatment, and it is time we gave up sedatives and rooted out the disease from its roots.

Let us fight sloth and abjection of soul by refraining from giving to beggars. If we refrain, they will refrain from beggary and be compelled to work, if they are able to work. As for the infirm among them, their kinsfolk and the public-spirited among the inhabitants will be compelled to seek shelter for them in asylums — whether by pressing the government to this end, or by enlarging the private undertakings that do such work, such as Father Yaacoub's project, for example.

Thus will Beirut be relieved of some of its burdens.