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:
1. It makes no attempt to classify.
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.