We feel bound therefore to say, that bad as they are, they are scarcely less sinned against in the treatment they receive, than they commit sin in the lawlessness of their lives. Everywhere viewed, and feeling themselves to be outcasts; possessed of nothing, except the miserable clothing which barely covers them; accustomed to beggary, and wholly dependent upon it; with no local attachments, except those which grow out of the facilities which in some places they may find for a more unrestrained indulgence than in others; with no friendships, and neither feeling nor awakening sympathy; is it surprising that they are debased and shameless, alternately insolent and servile, importunate for the means of subsistence and self-gratification, and averse from every means but that of begging to obtain them? The peculiar attraction of these unhappy fellow beings to our Commonwealth, and their preference for it over the States to the south of us, we believe is to be found in the legal provision which the State has made for them. Your Commissioners have indeed but a small amount of direct evidence of this; but the testimony of the chairman of the overseers in Egrement to this fact, derived from personal knowledge, was most unequivocal, and no doubt upon the subject existed in the minds of the overseers in many other towns. But shall we therefore condemn, or even severely blame, them? Considered and treated, in almost every place, as interlopers, strollers, vagrants; as objects of suspicion and dread, and, too often, scarcely as human beings; the cheapest methods are adopted of sending them from town to town, and often with the assurance given to them that _there_, and not _here_, are accommodations for them, and that _there_ they may enjoy the bounty which the State has provided for them. Would such a state of things, your Commissioners ask, have existed in our Commonwealth, if a specific legal provision had not been made for this class of the poor? Or, we do not hesitate to ask, if the Government had never recognized such a class of the poor as that of State’s poor,--and, above all, if compulsory charity, in any form, had never been established by our laws, would there have been a twentieth part of the wandering poor which now exists in it, or by any means an equal proportion of poor of any kind with that which is now dependent upon the taxes which are raised for them? Your Commissioners think not.