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• n  a solicitation for money or food (especially in the street by an apparently penniless person)
• n  the state of being a beggar or mendicant

• In Hamburg (reported the current issue of The World's Health) and in other Rhineland and southern German cities, a shrewd new system of handling beggary has been evolved.
• In Tokyo, where beggary had once been rare, police seized 232 vagrants in Ueno Park.
• A weak democratic government fails to maintain order, and is vilified by nationalists furious at the country's fall from world power to beggary.

• begging
• mendicancy
• mendicity

Quotes

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• James T. Callender in Washington Post
  In a widely reprinted rant that damned the sitting president as a British lackey, Callender concluded, "Take your choice between Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace and competency!"
• Edmund Burke in MWC News
  For as Edmund Burke, a British philosopher and statesman, said of socialism,"A perfect equality will indeed be produced. That is to say equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of the petitioners, a woeful, helpless, and desperate...
• Ronald Harwood in The Guardian
  Harwood agrees that the current climate heralds a return to Grub Street's days of "luxury or beggary".