CRIMINALS AND INCAPABLES, 99 



will be mixed the class we have especially to study 

 the incapables; a poor type, with physical and mental 

 defects, such as insanity, epilepsy, and idiocy, and with 

 these many vagrants must be included. Where laws 

 or regulations are framed to deal with these three 

 classes, as if they formed one natural class, the greatest 

 injustice of necessity follows. The law-makers have 

 to deal with the idle and vicious as well as with the 

 deserving and distressed, and by grouping these 

 classes together and framing regulations to apply to 

 all, some are of necessity treated more kindly than 

 they deserve, while others become the victims of un- 

 merited brutality. 



This fact was first brought forcibly home to me by 

 a case in a north country poorhouse a case which 

 quite represents the present disgraceful method of 

 treating those without means of subsistence. A 

 woman, a soldier's widow, whose husband and three 

 sons (all soldiers) had been killed in active service, 

 was left without relatives. She supported herself and 

 lived soberly until old age, when feebleness and com- 

 mencing gangrene of the foot compelled her to seek 

 the poorhouse, where she died alone and unvisited by 

 any friend. I saw her in the next bed to a drunken 

 prostitute. The one woman had given of her body 

 to the country's defence, the other had given of her 

 body to its ruin, and yet the country treated them 

 both alike because they were alike in want of bread. 



