Then come the infractions of the “Vagrancy Acts.” The offenses that are punished under these laws are chiefly prostitution, presence in public places with criminal intentions, presence in a particular house with criminal intentions, and carrying burglars’ implements. Prostitution aside, destitution ought not to be considered as the cause of these infractions, according to the author, because the guilty persons are those who ordinarily will not work and would not change their lot for anyone else’s. The class of vagrants is no more unhappy than any other; it has even its own philosophy. (—Who could be unhappy, then? This statement of the case gives one a great desire to ask the author how it happens that no people of means have adopted this enviable career.—) The same reasoning applies to most of the mendicants (45% of those who break the vagrancy laws), they do not want to work. Another fraction is made up of those who cannot find work; their number is difficult to determine; according to Morrison’s opinion it is not very high (he estimates it at 2% for mendicants). It is especially aged persons who belong to this class. There are two principal reasons for this. First, the increasing use of machines, which throw workmen out of employment, while increasing the possibility of utilizing the labor of women and children. —However true this observation, it is nevertheless very incomplete. It is not the machine that is the cause, but the system of free labor, which throws everyone on his own resources when he can work no longer, whether this is from lack of work or from the disability of the worker.— A second cause of vagrancy and mendicity is to be found in the Trades Unions. For these Unions have been able to obtain a uniform wage, and aged workmen must, in accordance with their rules, earn as much as the young ones although not able to do as much work. The employers, not being able to afford to give them the whole amount, discharge them. The circumstance that there are more male than female beggars is a proof to the author that economic conditions are not the cause of mendicity, etc., for women ordinarily live under worse conditions than men. “The only possible explanation of this state of thing is that vagrancy is, to a very large extent, entirely unconnected with economic conditions; the position of trade either for good or evil is a very secondary factor in producing this disease in the body politic; its extirpation would not be effected by the advent of an economic millennium; its roots are, as a rule, in the disposition of the individual and not to any serious degree in the industrial constitution of society.” [186]