VAGRANCY AND INDIGENCE.
A CASE at Bow Street Police-office tends to confirm our antici- pation, that Mr. Charles Buller's circular would not prove suffi- cient for the proper and distinctive treatment of paupers and va- grants.
Three Irishmen and a woman were charged, on Saturday, with breaking the windows of the Strand Union Workhouse. They were quite destitute; they had wandered about the streets for six nights, and demanded a lodging ; and being refused, they broke the windows, apparently with a view of extorting the allowance of shelter. They were on the ground that they belonged to the class who make a livelihood by going about from union to union—in fact, that they were professed vagrants. The treatment of this case by the Magistrate, was, if the news- paper report may be trusted, a mass of confused dicta, inconsistent with his own sentence. Too much attention, Mr. Henry said was paid to Mr. Charles Buller's letter, "which is not the law" ; and as "the law " is so imperfectly known or acted upon,-" many destitute persons are driven to resort to violence to obtain relief."
" You know nothing of their characters," said Mr. Henry to the Relieving. officer, "except that they are poor and destitute, and compelled to seek shelter in a quarter where the money of the ratepayers is collected for the purpose of afford- ing relief to all really destitute persons. The object of the union officers clearly is to throw the burden upon the next parish. This drives the poor to break win- dows; and thus our prisons are daily filled with such characters; who are driven to commit crime by the very persons whose duty it is to protect them."
The proper course in this case, he hinted, would have been to send the people back to their parishes in Ireland. However, they had no right to take the law into their own hands ; so he fined them, the destitute, 10s. each, with imprisonment for ten days in default of payment.
Is it possible to conceive a greater mockery of common sense than such a treatment of such a case ? The destitute are fined; the Relieving-officer is lectured for obeying his superior ; the rioters attain their end in the shelter and good living of a prison; and vagrants are told that, as "really destitute," they have an inde. feasible claim upon the poor-fund, Mr. Charles Buller and his colleagues of the Poor-law Board notwithstanding!
But Mr. Henry is a lawyer of ability, appointed to administer the law ; and we believe he is right in saying that Mr. Charles Buller's letter is not " the law "—it is only a hint of an ap- proach, which might be managed, by a stretching of the law, towards what the law, in Mr. Buller's estimation, ought to -be. It carries no sufficient compulsion, conveys no sufficient powers. It does not prevent Magistrates from thwarting Mr. Buller's ten- tative reforms ; it does not supply Magistrates with any sufficient rule for their guidance in cases like the one before us.
Yet the case is not very obscure or difficult. It is true that "the law " gives a claim on the poor-rates to all who are "really destitute"; but we have already shown that destitution is not a condition uniform in its attributes. The man who voluntarily waives employment, and in that way renders himself" destitute," has no equitable claim on the fund provided for those who are in- digent by misfortune, or even by error. It is not easy, except on strained and artificial grounds, to deny that a man has a right tobe idle, if it so please him to take the consequences with the indul- gence, including among those consequences starvation ; but such indulgence gives him no title to a share of a fund provided by law for persons involuntarily destitute : so that, when he en- deavours to obtain such share either by fraud or extortionate vio- lence, he commits a flagrant offence against natural equity as well as against the spirit of the Poor-law. In this view, supposing that the Relieving-officer of the Strand Union was right in his description of the four Irish people, the offence which they committed in making a demand on the poor-rate was far graver than the mere breaking of windows; indeed, the latter de- rived its greatest gravity from the fraudulent intent of the ori- ginal application for relief. But "the law" observes no effective distinction between the two principal classes of the destitute, and
therefore it does not prevent Magistrates from upholding vagrants in the serious offence even while punishing them for the lesser.
Mr. Buller's law is an improvement; but it is an unenacted law, and therefore is not binding. Hence we infer that it is necessary to seek that aid from Parliament which he declares to be supere- rogatory and unavailing ; and when he does seek such aid, we should advise a still more effective application of his own principle than that displayed in the circular of August the 4th. That was well enough as a makeshift, but as the sanction of Parliament must be invoked the work should be done effectually.
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