[In the Summer of 1911, Mr. Lewis traveled through Belgium, Holland, Germany, England and Scotland, studying European methods of dealing with delinquents, and especially the beggar colonies of Central Europe. The following article is a part of one chapter of Mr. Lewis’s report to the Prison Association of New York, which will be presented to the Legislature in 1912. The report has special significance because the state of New York is to build a compulsory farm colony for habitual tramps and vagrants.] Foreign countries, notably Belgium, Holland and Germany, have had lengthy and varied experience with the problem of vagabondage and mendicancy. Indeed in Central Europe the vagrancy problem is not alone a generation old, but a century old. Napoleon devoted some of his genius to the problem of the suppression of vagabondage. When the Dutch possessed Belgium as well as Holland, Dutch benevolent societies sought the reformation and rehabilitation of the vagabond. A half century ago Holland was segregating over one thousand vagabonds and beggars on the bleak heath in the north of Holland near the Zuyder Zee and already turning the arid plain into a blooming oasis. Belgium was creating fifty years ago local beggar colonies, and recognizing that vagrancy is one of the great social dangers of a nation, a danger increasing inevitably with the progress of civilization. Germany was thirty years ago this year establishing its first voluntary labor colony at Bielefeld in Central Prussia. Pastor von Bodelschwingh, the great organizer of philanthropic institutions for defectives of all kinds, founded with deep religious conviction his first farm colony for the “brothers of the highway.” Compulsory workhouses, semi-penal in nature, have come to number about thirty in the kingdom of Prussia, containing not thieves, not cases of assault, not robbers, not other criminals of greater or less degree, but solely vagrants, mendicants, and that despicable class of human beings, the souteneurs, who traffic in human flesh. Today the accumulated experience of generations can be found in the records and in the methods of administration of Belgian beggar colonies, Dutch vagrancy colonies, German free labor colonies and German compulsory workhouses. It is unthinkable that the United States, ever ready in commercial and industrial lines to profit not only by the mistakes but by the successes of other nations, will be blind to the wealth of experience that European countries can offer us.