A most important step should be to provide every homeless man or boy, woman or girl who may have been discharged from the house of correction, from the penitentiaries, hospitals or other institutions, with the hospitality of the Municipal Emergency Home, thereby pledging the support and good faith of the city to secure him food, shelter, an opportunity for honest employment, or the right, for a period, while enjoying the hospitality of the city, to look about for such labor as he or she may prefer. No one who lays any claim to enlightened opinion upon subjects of this character believes any longer that arrest and incarceration in a penal or corrective institution is a final answer to the social obligations of the community in behalf of the so-called casual vagrant, the wandering citizen, the itinerant wage-worker, or petty criminal, as they are miscalled. It may be true, perhaps, that a three or six months' imprisonment is the only present available means for "straightening up a drunk" or getting some "evil spirit" out of a young man's heart. But at its best it is a very dangerous medicine, and surely when society leaves a man or boy, woman or girl at the prison gate, after a jail sentence of greater or less duration, and tells him or her to shift, each for himself or herself as best they may, it is simply an invitation and an encouragement to vagrancy, vice, crime and immorality. The last important step in this mandatory municipal co-operation should be a direct attack upon the "barrel-houses," "free-flops," and "hang-outs," certain cheap lodgings and Missions. To continue a campaign against vagrancy by an indiscriminate raiding of such resorts has proven to be a miserable failure. If there is no other free, accessible and serviceable place for the homeless and indigent man, boy, woman or girl, they will simply find another center, and the last may be worse than the first. On the other hand, having understood and provided for the actual needs of the temporarily unemployed homeless, we have cut off the base of evil supplies of "the mendicant army" through the use of tickets to a modern Municipal Emergency Home, and the co-operation of all other municipal departments and the great public. Then, and not until then, can a modern Christian community strike effectively the final blow against these recruiting stations of vice, immorality, crime and disease.