ABSTRACT

England was not alone in punishing idleness and prescribing work as a cure for poverty and, although unemployment was in many conjunctures endemic, the hostility towards beggary and nomadism spread quickly throughout Europe. Consequently, the repression of vagrancy by imposing compulsory work at low wages was considered to be the only cure to overcome the economic crisis as well as to solve the problems of public security. It is important to distinguish two kinds of economic arguments when discussing the vagrancy laws and poor relief, Marx's treatment of the issue concerns, in a general perspective of economic change, compulsory underpaid work for the unemployed poor as a measure which accompanied and favoured the initial steps of capitalism. The question of whether mercy or justice should prevail as a guiding principle of charity continued to ail the conscience of those Catholics who were still directed by the traditional evangelical view of charity, and it never received a definitive, univocal answer.