Henry Mayhew, as the preface his excerpt titled "Hindo Beggars" suggests, was a writer that tended to focus on the "plight of poor Londoners" in regards to post-Industrial society, drawing sympathy for the downtrodden and unfortunate souls that couldn't find a way to get on their feet. However, Mayhew's sympathies extended only as far as those he considered his countrymen and women; regarding the "Hindos" and "Brahmins" - presumably Indian Londoners - Mayhew took a stance of hard-line distaste and outright racism. He calls these Londoners "snake-eyed Asiatics" with a penchant for deception, "entrapping the sympathy" of the good Christian Englishmen and women of London by regurgitating tracts or by insisting that they are of high birth - "Brahmins", or members of the highest caste in the predominantly Hindu British India. In essence, Mayhew paints these Indian-Far East Londoners as a wholly distasteful group of people who seek only to further their own fortunes through any means necessary. They are the other, the criminal, the bad in London society.
In many ways, this sort of distaste can be paralleled with the distaste that any major racial group can and more than often will have with the minority in a society. It's far too easy for the human creature, in general, to blame the ills of society on a single group of people that lack the numbers to defend themselves on a wide scale. While not the most original of comparisons, Nazi Germany and Victorian England share several similarities in their views of minority groups - in the Nazi's case, the Jews, Roma, and disabled suffered in together due to the popular demand for the development of the pure German Ubermensch and the propaganda that hung the ills of post World War I Germany, burdened to the breaking point with reparations to be paid to the Allies, on this group. While nothing on such a scale occurred in Victorian England, Mayhew describes the "Hindo Beggars" of London in similar fashion, seeking to out them as a credible danger to the common populace of London. Perhaps the most interesting move that Mayhew makes, however, is how he either subconsciously or purposefully enforced the idea of a supreme state power that could eliminate these "problems" from London. After all, if "they [the titular Hindo Beggars] never beg of soldiers, or sailors, to whom they always give a wide berth as they pass them in the streets..." then that must mean that they fear the state. The state, therefore, must be able to cull the issue of the "Hindo Beggars"; otherwise, the beggars would have no need to fear the state. It follows to reason, then, that if the "Hindo Beggars" are as bad as Henry Mayhew describes, that the state, whom the beggars fear, should eliminate them.
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