IHE Joint Committee of Shanghai Women's Organizations held their monthly meeting on Wednesday at the Polish Legation and were most hospitably entertained by the Polish Women's Cultural Association.
The afternoon was devoted to discussions arising out of the activities of the first discussion, means to supper' foreign areas of Shanghai in their of the streets were sought, and Civic Affairs Committee. In the t the Municipal Councils of the efforts to improve the cleanliness methods of instruction for the populace in their duty to assist in maintaining that cleanliness by refraining from committing various nuisances. From this talk the question of the beggars naturally arose.
Mrs. Pettitt opened the discussion by giving an account of previous attempts to solve this problem. At one time Buddhist organizations gave meal tickets to beggars in the cold weather, and even sheltered some for a short time. These activities cost much money but achieved nothing permanent, and did not even approach any solution of the problem, being merely palliative.
Tu 1922 the Women's Christian Temperance Union made investigations, and found that beggars fell into two classes: Professional beggars and part-time beggars who lived in their own homes.
In the Beggars' Guild nine out of ten appeared to be drug addicts, and large numbers were literate. Aids to begging were: Trained dogs: The Use of snakes. Personal deformities: and here the professional beggars would be purposely maimed, having arms or feet cut off, or blindness induced: Great ugliness. Each beggar had his own district, which was his adults. The experiment promised Success, but was too short-lived because of the outbreak of war for any real conclusions to be drawn from it. It had given, at any rate, a lead towards the adoption of a constructive policy to the beggar problem.
Brigadier Morris then spoke of the work done by the Salvation Army in India and Ceylon, when the criminal inbes of India, and the beggars of Ceylon proved themselves to be too difficult a problem for the respective governments to solve. The Salvation Army's help was enlisted and proved to be an outstanding success. The beggar menace belongs to the past.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.