With the purpose of rendering a slight contribution to American information on this subject, a considerable part of my last summer’s tour in Belgium, Holland, Germany, England and Scotland, as general secretary of the prison association of New York, was devoted to the first-hand study of the administration of institutions for vagrants and mendicants and the study also of their history and of the laws under which at various times they have been operated. In several chapters following this introductory chapter I present a somewhat careful study of Merxplas the world-famous beggar colony of Belgium; of Veenhuizen, the less known but remarkably interesting vagrancy colony of Holland; of the free labor colonies and the compulsory workhouses of Prussia and Germany; and of conditions and problems of vagrancy in England and Scotland. Several general observations may well precede the special chapters. 1. In all four of the countries above mentioned (Belgium, Holland, England and Scotland) the correctional institutions in which vagrants and mendicants are confined are under the same governing body as that which governs the prisons. In Belgium and Holland, the department of justice controls the beggar colonies and the vagrancy colonies. In England and Scotland the boards of prison commissioners are the governing bodies not only for the convict prisons in which the more serious offenders are imprisoned, but also the local prisons, which are the places of imprisonment of beggars and mendicants. In Prussia, the Arbeitshâuser (compulsory workhouses) are under provincial, not royal control. In short, in Prussia compulsory workhouses are county institutions, or in the case of Berlin municipal institutions, rather than state institutions. We find, herefore, in Holland and Belgium special institutions for the imprisonment of vagrants and mendicants controlled by the state, in Prussia special institutions for the imprisonment of vagrants and mendicants controlled by the provinces corresponding in general to our American counties; we find in England and Scotland local prisons, not specially designated for vagrants and mendicants, controlled by the state through boards of prison commissioners. While in Prussia the American student might perhaps expect under provincial (county) management a condition analogous to the indifferent if not highly neglectful management of correctional institutions so familiar to American students, where politics rule in county affairs, the fact is that the Prussian county compulsory workhouses are managed with that German thoroughness, efficiency, and integrity which makes these county institutions, so far as my observations went, fully comparable with the management of the state prisons and penitentiaries.