It is evident therefore that the whole legislation of our country must be remodelled, for _it is on the social organism as a whole_ that social provision now devolves.
Green relates that the whole mass of Elizabethan poverty was absorbed into healthy life by a wise poor law.
It will be our next duty to examine how far other nations furnish us already with an object lesson in this respect.
We may summarise the case against the tramp ward as follows:
2. It pauperises without relieving distress.
3. It is unequally and often unjustly or defectively administered.
4. It provides for destitution a worse treatment than that of prison for crime.
5. It therefore exerts pressure towards vagrancy and crime instead of acting as a true deterrent.
6. Its existence blinds the public to the fact of _the absence of public provision for migrating_, and the evils of sleeping out and unsanitary lodging-houses accumulate.
IX. VAGRANCY LEGISLATION IN OTHER COUNTRIES.
We have now to consider the treatment received by vagrants in other countries. Have they been more successful than ourselves? If so, why? Count Kropatkin shows in "Farms, Fields, and Factories," that the Industrial revolution is not confined to England. Belgium for instance is a country with large manufactures. It is also a small country, and it is easier to examine the entire working of a Poor Law in a small country than in a large one. A most interesting account is given in a pamphlet printed by W. K. Martin, 290, High Street, Lincoln, of the Belgian Labour Colonies, personally visited by H. J. Torr and R. A. Marriott, Major, D.S.O., Governor of Lincoln Prison.
A vagrancy committee was appointed from Midsummer Sessions, Lincoln, in consequence of the number of vagrants committed to Lincoln Prison and the unsatisfactory nature of the prison treatment. They report "that the present short sentences, especially in view of the improved prison dietary, are a treatment of no deterrent value." They are of opinion "that the present methods of dealing with offences under the Vagrancy Acts are not satisfactory in their effect on the habitual vagrant, whilst they make no provision for the man who, gradually slipping out of employment through inefficiency, forms the readiest recruit for the professional vagrant class." "Prison conditions indeed, to persons with so low a standard of physical comfort as the average vagrant, must be extremely comfortable and even attractive." (See note 25.)