DETENTION COLONIES AND LABOUR HOUSES.

In whatever direction we look, misguided indulgence is seen to be shown to classes amongst the least deserving in the community. But our systematic playing with this question cannot relieve us from the duty of facing it in all its seriousness, and of adopting whatever measures a due consideration of public policy may suggest.

I come, then, to the question of remedies. What can, what should, be done? Shall we, in despair, settle down to the conviction that the loafer is not to be extinguished, but must be regarded as filling an inevitable, though not, of course, a desirable, place in society? Or shall we try to exterminate him by the expedient of compelling him to perform the social functions which alone establish for him or for anyone a right to any place in the commonwealth? I take the latter view, and I base my contentions upon the maxim of Stuart Mill—no unreasoning advocate of interference with personal freedom:—

"Whenever there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law."[42]

To the proposals originally put forward so many years ago, I return with increased conviction, not only of their practicableness, but of their urgency; with the assurance, moreover, that public opinion now fully recognises their reasonableness and necessity. Proceeding from the presupposition that the maintenance of vagrants at the public expense is contrary to sound economic law, to the common interest, and to commonsense, I contend that the status of vagrancy should be made in reality, what it is already in theory, illegal. That principle admitted, the task which remains will be less to do away with the vagrant than to make the vagrant do away with himself. To do this will entail no revolutionary change of the law; on the contrary, it will only be necessary to put into operation, seriously and systematically, the law as it exists at the present time.

And first I would lay down as a foundation principle, as the starting point from which all reformative measures must proceed, the transference from the Poor Law to the Penal Law of the entire tribe of loafers who systematically abuse public relief—the vagrant of the casual ward; the shirker of domestic responsibilities, who throws his family upon the Union and absconds, or who sneaks into the workhouse on every possible pretext, dragging wife and children with him; the drone who makes periodical visits to the labour yard; and the able-bodied pauper whose destitution is due to intemperance or an otherwise irregular life.

To the Poor Law and to Poor Law institutions people of these classes emphatically do not belong, and all past failure to make the slightest impression upon them is in my opinion primarily due to the persistent mistake of treating their case as coming under the law of public charity—a mistake which is also a wrong so long as the idle poor are maintained, in any degree whatsoever, at the expense of the industrious poor.

The practical measures which would be needful are these.

(1) In the first place, let loafing of every kind, and not merely the loafing of the casual pauper, be made a misdemeanour. For if we begin to exterminate the idler of the highway, we must, in fairness, deal with his kinsman of the street and of the workhouse.

(2) In sympathy with this measure, restrict the right of free migration in the case of the destitute unemployed to the extent of making it dependent on permission to travel in search of work. (The man with money in his pocket is his own master all the world over.)

(3) Further, and particularly, abolish the casual ward, as we logically must do. This may seem a strong measure, but so far as the tramp is concerned, it is really the fulcrum on which the lever of reformation must rest. "The why is plain as way to parish church." If vagabondage is to be regarded as an offence to be punished instead of an innocent weakness (which it never was and never can be) to be humoured, then the vagrant's free lodging-house must disappear. It is obvious that so long as we maintain wayside shelters for the special reception of tramps, it will be hopeless to repress vagrancy. The casual ward invites vagrants and creates them. Moreover, it is entirely incompatible with the laws which already exist for the nominal repression of vagrancy. It is illegal to beg, it is illegal to wander about without means of subsistence, but there is no habitual vagrant living who is not guilty of this compound fracture of the law, and few who have not been punished for it. Nevertheless, we wink at these misdemeanours, and in housing some 10,000 vagrants every night in the casual wards, we offer direct encouragement to known law-breakers to persist in illegality.

(4) But at these negative and repressive measures it will be impossible to stop. Their very operation would compel us to go further, for the tramp and the loafer having been hustled from their wonted haunts, and the casual ward having been shut in their faces, they would either have to betake themselves to honest work, or they would fall into the hands of the police, either as mendicants or homeless wanderers.

Here is seen the need for a new departure in our penal system. At present no correctional institutions exist suited to offenders whose radical fault is constitutional idleness. Discipline, enforced by all necessary use of compulsion, is their principal need, and this discipline can only be given in special institutions.

The ordinary prison has proved its uselessness for the treatment of the vagrant and loafer, for not only has it failed as a reformative agency, but its life has no terrors for him. By the testimony of prison governors and magistrates, the tramp, on the whole, prefers the prison to the present workhouse; an institution that would exercise a deterrent influence must, therefore, offer a severer discipline than either.

Complaint was made by the Standing Joint Committee of the Lincolnshire magistrates some time ago that mendicancy had increased 100 per cent. on account of the superiority of the prison dietary. "The professional tramp," said one magistrate, "was no fool, and he very much preferred in many instances to go to prison than to enter the casual wards of the workhouse." The Lindsey Quarter Sessions Committee appointed in 1903 to consider the question of vagrancy reported :—

"Frequent cases have come to the knowledge of the Committee in which tramps in the casual wards, when threatened with prosecution before the magistrates as a consequence of a refusal to work, have openly avowed their preference for prison life, and cases are also noted where, after sentence, the prisoners have made a similar statement as to their having no dislike for prison. This failure, they believe, is also partly due to the changes in the form of the 'hard labour' enforced, due to the abolition of tread wheel, crank, etc. Owing to the difficulty of arranging suitable work, and to requirements of the prison for chapel, meal hours, marching to and from work, etc., the hours of actual labour, as well as the severity of the work available, bear no comparison with those of many kinds of free labour outside. Prison conditions, indeed, to many persons with so low a standard of physical comfort as the average vagrant, must be extremely comfortable and even attractive."

Evidence to the same effect might be cited in abundance from other quarters. The point is one to which the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy gave special attention. Asked by the Committee "Do you not find that the seven days' sentence given to these tramps induces many of them to commit some small offence to get imprisonment, with a view to being helped along by rail to their destination?" Lieut.-Col. J. Curtis Hayward, Chairman of the Gloucestershire Vagrancy Committee, replied:—

"I do not think the prison has any terror. For instance, in one union they have had a great number of cases of refractory tramps, and they have always stated, when they have been had up, that they would rather do the hard work in prison than break stones in the workhouse, because it is easier work. I have been told by the governor of a gaol that some of the prisoners said that they liked the fare better than they did that of the workhouse."

Another witness, before the same Committee (Mr. A. C. Mitchell), speaking for Wiltshire and Gloucestershire, said:—

"I think that under present conditions the sending of vagrants to gaol is utterly useless. They want to go to gaol; the conditions in gaol are better than those in casual wards, and particularly in bad weather they prefer going to gaol. Over and over again it has come before us: a man commits some petty offence in order to go to gaol for a short period."[43]

What are needed in this country are the Detention Colonies and Labour Houses[44] which have long been provided in Continental countries for this type of offender. To these institutions, differentiated according as they were intended for hopeful or for incorrigible cases, all vagrants and loafers should, after due warning, be committed for a period sufficiently long for disciplinary purposes.

Besides being penal in character, these institutions might also offer, under suitable conditions, a temporary home to unemployed persons of all kinds. It might be objected that this would be a practical admission of the principle of the Right to Work. For myself I do not care much for phrases, but even if this should be the case, I would reply that the Right to Work is an infinitely better and wiser and safer principle to concede to the masses than the Right to be Idle. And yet the admission of the Right to Work would be no new thing in this country. It was enacted as early as the fourteenth century, in a Poor Law of 12 Richard II. That law drew a distinction between "beggars impotent to serve" and "beggars able to labour." The former were "continually to abide during their lives" in their native towns, or wherever else the enactment of the statute happened to find them, and the latter were to be given work suited to their strength and capacity. It may be recalled, too, how this same principle was carried further by the Poor Laws of Elizabeth's reign.

It follows that the Detention Colonies and Labour Houses, by offering admission to unemployed persons willing to enter voluntarily, would allow Poor Law authorities to abolish the labour yards for test work. Few Poor Law workers defend these yards, which under the existing law are flagrantly abused by local able-bodied loafers.

Forced labour for the loafer is still more an English tradition, though, like the Right-to-Work principle, long disregarded. The Act of 27 Henry VIII. (1535) enjoined local authorities, besides maintaining the impotent and aged poor:—

"To cause and to compel all and every the said sturdy vagabonds and valiant beggars to be set and kept to continual labour, in such wise as by their said labours they, and every one of them, may get their own living with the continual labour of their own hands."

The cost of these institutions was to be defrayed by alms collected by the churchwardens and others, but any parish which neglected to carry out the Act was liable to a fine of 20s. for every month of omission. The Act of I Edward VI. (1548) contained similar provisions. Early in the reign of Elizabeth a proposal was laid before the Government by a Somerset justice of the peace for the erection of houses of correction, adjacent to gaols, for the reception of convicted vagrants, who should be there "kept in work, except some person would take them into service," and, added the memorialist, "I dare presume the tenth felony will not be committed that now is." An Act of 14 Elizabeth (1572) empowered the local justices to use surplus monies collected for the relief of the impotent poor in putting rogues and vagabonds to work in "convenient places," under the control of the overseers. A more systematic plan was that proposed by the Act of 1575, requiring Quarter Sessions to establish "abiding houses or places convenient in some market town or corporate town or other place," to be called houses of correction, and to be stocked with wool, hemp, flax, iron, or "such other stuff as was best suited to the country" (i.e., the locality), with implements for the manufacture thereof, and in these houses were to be "straitly kept, as well in diet as work, and also punished from time to time," vagrants and beggars, and other people of questionable utility to the commonwealth. The Act threatened with a fine of £5 every justice who left Quarter Sessions "before conference had touching the execution of this statute," the fines to go towards the cost of establishing and furnishing the houses of correction. Similarly, an Act of 1597 required the justices to provide houses of correction for vagrants to be used in addition to the county gaols. In 1609 an Act was passed exposing to a penalty of £5 every justice of a county in which a house of correction was not provided within two years. These institutions were established on a considerable scale, but in course of time their reformative purpose gave place to a penal one. As the Vagrancy Committee point out:—

"In 1630 a Royal Commission, issued for the purpose of enforcing the vagrancy laws, directed that the houses of correction should be made adjacent to the common gaols and the gaoler made governor of them, so that the prisoners in the gaols might be taught to work as well as those committed to the houses of correction. After this date the houses of correction seem to have been regarded more and more as places of punishment, to which persons were committed for definite terms to do hard labour, rather than to be taught to work; and in many counties the common gaols were used as houses of correction. It is from an amalgamation of the two that the modern local prison has sprung."[45]

Throughout the following century the tendency to regard vagrancy less from the standpoint of public safety and policy than from that of public expense gained the upper hand. Vagrants, as such, had ceased to be obnoxious; what was disliked was their propensity for throwing themselves upon the charity of parishes in which they had no settlement. Hence the policy of whipping these offenders, whether women or men, and restoring them to their legal parishes, was consistently followed in the eighteenth century. It was an irrational and costly policy, though in keeping with the particularist spirit of the times. In 1821 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider the abuses which had arisen out of this system of "passing" vagrants, and, as a result, the existing legislation on the subject was repealed in 1822. It was stated in the House of Commons at that time that in Wiltshire and an adjoining county £2,587 had been expended from the county funds in one year in "passing" vagrants and that in 1821, £100,000 had, in the aggregate, been spent in this way.

Nevertheless, that the idea of curing the loafer by forced labour was not entirely forgotten, is proved by the fact that in 1848, when the Poor Law Board took the place of the Poor Law Commissioners appointed under the Poor Law Act of 1834, a proposal to return to the old disciplinary method was put forward by one of the first Poor Law Inspectors, Mr. Aneurin Owen, who recommended the establishment of pauper depots on islands off the coast, at which local stone might be broken for road use.

I confess to attaching more importance to the disciplinary influence of rigorous restraint, coupled with active exertion, than to any number of periodical months in county gaols. Punishment may do good or may not: but punishment is not enough. It is not—in the main, at any rate—a dangerous criminal class with which we have to do, but for the most part the weak and aimless characters whose great need is the moral tonic of discipline and compulsion. Lodged in such institutions as will be described in later chapters, these evaders of all social obligations would learn, or at least would be taught, both how to work and the duty of industry. As I shall show, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland have all found it advantageous to establish Labour Houses, true to their name, for the special treatment of social parasites of this kind, and while imitation in details may be neither possible nor desirable, their experience throws valuable light upon both sides of the problem—on the one hand, the case of those hardened offenders upon whom indulgence is thrown away and, on the other hand, the case of the budding loafers who have not irrevocably chosen between the life of diligence and that of sloth.

The possibilities of the philanthropic Labour Colonies of the Continental pattern, to be conducted by Boards of Guardians, have impressed many Poor Law reformers who have begun to occupy themselves with the tramp. I may claim to know well the work of the best voluntary Labour Colonies of the Continent, having visited some of them, and while agreeing that institutions of this kind—albeit with the addition of compulsory powers of detention, which the Continental colonies do not possess—might do for young and first offenders, I am confident that a rÉgime many degrees stricter and more methodical would be necessary before they could hope to make any impression upon the habitual loafer. Here, however, we see the idea of coddling the tramp, even while we are trying to reform him, creeping in already in a new guise. These good people readily admit that discipline of some kind is necessary; but while they would restrain the tramp henceforth, it would be with cords of love. The poor fellow has been taught by the rude buffeting of the workhouse to hate labour. Who would love work after he had, for years, been passing through the mill of the casual ward, which grinds the instinct of diligence and self-respect slowly, indeed, but exceeding small? This has been the hard experience of the tramp. The continual sight of heaps of stones and oakum, which he was expected to disintegrate according to their kind, by way of paying for his humble bed and board, has created in him a distaste for even more dignified kinds of labour, so that the very sight of a spade, a pick-axe, or a dirty apron gives him quite a turn. So the tramp's tender-hearted, ever-faithful sympathisers are arguing; he shall not be passed under draconian laws if they can help it.

There can be no hope of advance on the right lines until this mischievous appeal to sentiment is abandoned. It has been the bane of the Vagrancy Laws for generations, and more than anything else is responsible for the present difficulties of the tramp problem in its several phases. Short of compulsion, the tramp will not work, and the hope of inducing him to take to a life of industry, by placing him in an atmosphere of art and poetry, perfumes and texts, is to go counter to all the lessons of experience, and to utterly misunderstand the instincts of the tramp nature. Else how explain the notorious fact that wherever a workhouse adopts a fairly severe labour test there the tramp cannot be persuaded to go; while, conversely, the easier the terms of admission—or, more truly, of exit—the fuller is the casual ward. I read in the newspapers, at the moment of writing, that "The new labour tests adopted by the Sleaford Guardians are answering very satisfactorily, and at the fortnightly meeting, the master reported that during the past six months there had been a decrease of 250 vagrants at the Union." The fact that this official had also to complain of "dissatisfied vagrants," and "the breaking of windows and other Union property" by these irreconcilable visitors, only confirms the truth that vagrancy and hatred of work are convertible terms. But, if so, it follows that it is only by curing this unsocial aversion to exertion that the unsocial practice of vagabondage will cease to perplex and scandalise society, and to do that, coercive measures of a very definite kind will have to be employed, let the repository of power be as it may. The treatment of the tramp must, of course, be humane—that it should be other is inconceivable in these days, when even the inmates of our prisons are assured a standard of life far beyond the reach and hope of thousands of the poor who help to maintain the prisons and the prisoners—but it must, none the less, be distinctly punitive and deterrent. It must not be desirable to be sent to a disciplinary establishment of this kind; a man must rather be willing to work voluntarily outside than to work compulsorily inside.

In addition to those sentenced to detention for vagrancy, the forced Labour Houses would meet the case of several other classes of notorious delinquents. They include the following:—

(1) Husbands who desert their families, and against whom legal redress cannot be obtained.

(2) Paupers of the "in-and-out" class who use the workhouse as a means of evading their parental responsibilities.

(3) Able-bodied paupers whose destitution is due to idleness and unwillingness to maintain themselves.

(4) Dissolute persons whose life is an alternation of more or less regular work and spells of indulgence from which the workhouse is their only hope of recovery.

(5) Certain classes of confirmed inebriates.

(6) Unmarried women of inferior mental and moral capacity, dependent on the rates, who have had more than one illegitimate child.

Some of these offenders would be committed by the magistrates owing to the action of the police in the ordinary way. In Poor Law cases it would be justifiable to dispense with open judicial proceedings, and to empower the Poor Law Authority to commit, on a certificate signed by one or more magistrates, giving the offender (as in Hamburg)[46] the right of appeal, first to the authority itself against the execution of its resolution to proceed, and before the execution of a magisterial certificate to Petty Sessions.

There remains another class of persons who constitute a serious social burden and inconvenience, the criminals, loafers, and paupers of alien origin, who probably are more numerous, and certainly are more indulgently treated, in England than in any Continental country. At present a small minority of the criminal aliens convicted are deported after the completion of their sentences. The number of aliens (the Colonies and India not counted), convicted and committed to the local prisons in 1907 was 2,799, or 4.3 per cent. of the total number. The aliens recommended for deportation in that year numbered 289.[47] It is conceivable that deportation will be resorted to upon a very much more extensive scale, and eventually that the duty and expense of punishment, where the alien is detained, will be undertaken by the country of nationality; there is obviously little reason or satisfaction in maintaining criminal aliens in prison when banishment awaits them immediately on release.[48] As for the alien vagabond and loafer we have the example of Continental States to guide us. The laws of Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland expressly enjoin expulsion as the treatment of such persons; they are simply taken across the nearest frontier, and are warned against returning. It would not be unreasonable to apply to alien loafers the summary treatment which their own Governments do not hesitate to enforce. As to the destitute who fall upon the Poor Law, it should be possible to conclude with Continental Governments treaties applying internationally the principle of "relief settlement," under which each State would either receive its own citizens who became chargeable to the public funds of another country, or at least would refund the costs of their maintenance to the Poor Law Authority which discharged this duty for it.

The latest complete return of alien paupers in England and Wales relates to July 1, 1903, when their number was 1,753, of whom 897 were relieved in London, and 856 in the provinces. They included 587 indoor paupers, 694 outdoor paupers, and 472 insane in asylums. Exclusive of the insane, they consisted of 117 men relieved with wives or children, 95 wives of men relieved, 95 women relieved with children, but not with husbands, 362 other men, 193 other women, 359 children of men and women relieved, and 60 other children. Of the total of 1,753 alien paupers of all classes, 715 or 41 per cent. were from Russia and Poland, 502 or 30 per cent. from Germany, 110 or 6 per cent. from France, 106 or 6 per cent. from Italy, 70 or 4 per cent. from Norway and Sweden, and the remaining 250 represented twenty-three other countries. In London the aliens represented 0.74 per cent. of the total pauperism, in the provinces they represented 0.33 per cent. The support of these outsiders constitutes a public burden for which there seems no moral justification. The question of their treatment is one which should not be approached in a captious, much less a bigoted, spirit, but if it is inequitable—as the law declares it to be—that one English Poor Law Union should support the paupers of another, it is doubly inequitable that the nation should show to other countries an unequally reciprocated generosity in the care of so many of their citizens, and these amongst the least desirable.

It would be essential to success that detention should, in all but the most hopeful cases, be for a long period. This is not only the practice of all Continental Labour Houses, but the past prison treatment of vagrants in this country proves the uselessness of short sentences. In Germany the term of commitment may extend to two years; in Belgium it must fall within two and seven years. At the same time discretion should be given to the authorities to curtail the sentence, within fixed limits, where the detainee gives proof of reformation and a desire to follow a regular mode of life. In such a case, release would be on parole, and in the event of a repetition of the offence which entailed commitment, the man would be reapprehended and sent back to the Labour House to complete his sentence without further legal procedure.

There are strong reasons why Detention Colonies and Labour Houses should be county institutions, just as they are provincial institutions in Prussia. The fact that many of their inmates, under the organisation proposed, would be defaulters committed on the application of the Poor Law Authorities, is a strong argument for such a local basis. There is reason to fear that if the Colonies and Labour Houses were formally incorporated in the prison system of the country, they would imbibe too much the prison atmosphere and spirit, and would tend to become identical with existing houses of correction, just as the houses of correction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ultimately lost their special character as reformatory institutions. It might be desirable that offenders sentenced should be removed for detention to the county in which they had legal settlement, in preference to being punished in the county in which the offence was committed, but failing that course, the county or parish of settlement would be liable for all costs of maintenance as in the case of non-settled paupers.

While primarily the cost of these institutions would be a county charge, Poor Law Authorities would be required to pay on a fixed scale for the maintenance of all persons detained at their instigation, and it might be expedient to require in respect of every detainee a certain contribution from the parish in which he had legal settlement, as is the case in some of the Swiss cantons. The liability of the detainees themselves would be compounded by their labour, which it would be the business of the Colonies and Labour Houses to employ to the best possible advantage. Although, on this plan, the institutions would be under county management, it would be necessary that the State should exercise far-going powers of control, either through the Home Office, the Local Government Board, or the Prison Board, and that all schemes of organisation, regulations, the more important appointments, and also expenditure of certain kinds, should receive the approval of the Central Authority.

It should not be required, nor would it be necessary, that every county should have its own Detention Colony or Labour House. For reasons both of economy and efficiency counties would be allowed to combine. Only in this way would it be possible to secure variety of type in the establishment of these institutions. Not much experience would be needed to show that the same treatment would not suit every class of offender; most of the Colonies, no doubt, would be fairly uniform, but one or more would be required for the more rigorous discipline which would have to be meted to old offenders. Possibly, a single Colony of this kind, organised after the pattern of the Beggars' Depot of Merxplas, in Belgium,[49] would serve for the whole country. If the existing Poor Law is, in the elegant phrase now current, to be "broken up", it might be found that some of the existing rural workhouses would serve as the nuclei of Detention Colonies of the milder type.

It would be a condition of establishing Detention Colonies and Labour Houses, that they should exist for the purpose of hard work, for the art of labour is only acquired by labour. Of such work the average loafer is quite capable, if only the necessary pressure could be applied. As to vagrants, official statistics show that the majority of them are in the able-bodied period of life: of 5,579 casual paupers relieved on January 1, 1900, about 70 per cent. were between thirty-five and sixty-five years of age; 23 per cent. were between sixteen and thirty-five years, and only 5 per cent. were above sixty-five. If the vagrant can, every day, walk the almost incredible distances which he tells us, there is in him immense store of energy which is going to waste. A Detention Colony, properly organised, and infused with an atmosphere of industry, would use this energy for the good of society and of the loafer himself.

It would be judicious, as well as equitable, to pay the detained worker wages, or a bonus on output, by way of encouraging him to diligence and exertion, and of providing him with decent clothing, tools, and a small sum of money wherewith to begin life again on regaining his liberty. Even the most conscientious of free workmen is spurred by the thought of the wages which will reward his efforts, and there is nothing ignoble in such a stimulus. The natural atmosphere of a Detention Colony is that of the outside labour market, to which, by right, the detained workers belong, and the existence of a money nexus between the man and his work will be a set-off against the chafing thought of bondage, a constant reminder that the man, in doing well for the colony, is also doing something good for himself, and an incentive to those habits of honesty and application which will alone enable him to regain, and permanently retain, control over his own life. Moreover, the wages or bonus should be held before the worker in the clearest and most definite manner—not as an act of charity, but as a "business proposition," not as largess, but as a right. If the man can be incited to a healthy egoism, so much the better; he will be the less likely to fall back when he has to fight his way outside. In short, payment should be an essential part of Detention Colony policy, and the moral value of the habit of money earning should not be spoiled by too much talk of privileges and favours. The character of the Colonies and of their inmates, the unfavourable conditions under which much of the work would have to be done, and the limited market that would be available for its produce, would necessarily restrict the wages to a very small sum; the essential thing is that they should be paid, and that the workers should be able to estimate the amount of their possible gains beforehand.

It would seem expedient that every Colony or Labour House should follow a mixed economy of agriculture and industry. Wherever possible, a farm should be an essential part of it, in order that all such primary necessaries of life as milk, butter, meat, roots, and vegetables, might be produced, as far as practicable, by the aid of the inmates' labour. It would also be advantageous, following the example of the Voluntary Colonies which have been established in this and other countries, to begin each settlement on a tract of land, a considerable part of which, at least, is undeveloped, with a view to the provision of an abundance of rough outdoor labour by means of works of reclamation, and to securing to the Colony the increased value which such works would create. It is also desirable that the Colonies, while lying away from towns, should have good means of communication.

On this subject some words may be quoted from a letter recently written to me by Monsieur Louis Stroobant, the energetic director of the Belgian State Beggars' Depot at Merxplas:—

"It is expedient to create establishments like Merxplas in districts but little populated and situated at some distance from towns. It is also indispensable that a colony of this kind should be near a small railway station or a canal, in a healthy country, should be well provided with drinking water, and should be in a locality in which the inmates would be able to make the bricks needed for buildings."

While, however, farm and land labour would form an essential source of employment and of gain in the Detention Colonies, the broad basis would need to be industrial. This is proved by the experience of all the forced Labour Colonies of the Continent of which I have knowledge, with the one exception of the Rummelsburg Labour House, near Berlin, and in this exceptional case the labour of the inmates is largely used in working the extensive sewage farms of the Berlin municipality. For obvious reasons, it would be necessary to choose such trades as could be carried on economically. In the first place, comparatively few men of the type suited to a Vagrant Colony are fit for ordinary farm work, which needs far more skill and intelligence than most urban advocates of Labour Colony schemes seem to imagine. After allowing for the relatively small number of inmates whose labour would be needed on the farm all the year round, the remainder, the great majority, would have to be employed on works of improvement, and in the workshops. The former work would necessarily be of an intermittent character, and even so would, in time, be reduced to very limited proportions. Unless outdoor employment altogether outside the establishment, such as road-making, draining, levelling, gardening, and forestry, were to be resorted to, as in some of the German forced Labour Colonies, it would be necessary to fall back on industrial work. Probably it would also be found that training in such work would offer most men the best chance of reinstating themselves in society when they obtained their release, and from the financial standpoint it would undoubtedly yield the best results for the Colony.

The question of allowing the products of Detention Colonies to compete with the products of free labour would inevitably arise, and not improbably the bare possibility of such competition occurring would be used as an argument against the establishment of these Colonies. It is obvious, however, that if the object of Detention Colonies is to assist their inmates to go back into the world able to earn an honest livelihood by industry, there must be some slight sacrifice of private interest to public advantage. Clearly, a policy of give and take would have to be adopted. There are products which forced Labour Colonies might legitimately be allowed to send into the open market without injury to the most sensitive outside industry—farm produce, for example, if a superfluity were available—but, as far as possible, the goods produced should be for home consumption and for the public services, as is the case in other countries. The interchange of products between the various Colonies should be encouraged, as it would not only lighten the common burden of maintenance, but would facilitate trade specialisation and the classification and grading of the inmates.

It would be unwise to hope, however, that any Labour Colony would be made self-supporting, in spite of some confident opinions to the contrary which were put before the Vagrancy Committee. The very fact that the Colonies would have to be worked with an inefficient class of labour, and the inevitably high costs of administration and oversight, make it impossible to regard them as profit-earning institutions. Nevertheless, if a Colony were well organised, well managed, and not too tightly restricted in the character of its industries and the extent of its market, the costs of maintenance should not be heavy. In this respect the experience of the Belgian and some of the Prussian and Swiss Labour Houses, dealt with later, is very encouraging.

More important than any consideration of immediate financial results, however, is the permanent influence of Colony discipline upon the inmates; if that were assured, financial success would also be certain, if not to the Colony itself, then to the community outside, which is practically the same thing. It is imperatively necessary, however, that we should at the outset be perfectly clear, not only as to the object aimed at in setting up Detention Colonies, but as to the practical possibilities of these Colonies. The object must not and cannot be to make perfect men out of most imperfect material; it will be the far more modest one of correcting tendencies of character and conduct which are socially injurious, with a view to returning the objects of care to freedom, if they seriously wish to regain freedom, able, under favourable circumstances, to take an independent place amongst the social hewers of wood and drawers of water. Only by setting before ourselves sane and moderate views shall we be working to serious purpose; to act otherwise will be to waste effort and court certain disappointment. It is hardly too much to say that it will be safer to aim too low than too high in undertaking the difficult task of socialising and moralising the loafer.

Let us indulge in no illusions on the subject: the proportion of the detainees who will be really "reformed" will be exceedingly small; those upon whom some wholesome influence, of longer or shorter duration, will be exerted, will form a larger number; but it is possible that the great majority will return again and again to detention and may even prove irremediable and entirely unfit to be restored to society.

In the main, therefore, the Detaining Colonies may, in the end, prove to be largely institutions of restraint. Yet even on that basis they are necessary, and the service which they will do to society will by no means be a negative service. They will, in fact, be carrying out the idea which more and more finds favour amongst penologists, and which must inevitably be far more rigorously applied in the future than it is now, that persons whose liberty is injurious to the commonwealth must be deprived of that liberty, permanently if necessary, and in any case so long as they continue capable of social harm.

It may be asked, can a place be found in a system of Detention Colonies and Labour Houses for the Voluntary Labour Colonies and Depots of various types which already exist in this country? To my mind, the latter would still be able to do a most important and indispensable work, and to do it under conditions more favourable to successful results than those which prevail at present. There is a fashion in opprobrium as in other things, and it appears to be fashionable to reproach these voluntary institutions with the small percentage of their good cases, and to question their efficiency and expediency. Even if their visible success were far less than it is, the Labour Colonies and Depots established by philanthropic agencies are deserving of the highest praise. They are trying to discharge, with inadequate resources, and with little public recognition, the duty of society towards two large classes of people—the unemployed and the unemployable, and they would have work enough of the same kind to do, even were Detention Institutions of the kind proposed in full operation.

The existing Labour Colonies and Depots would be specially useful in dealing with men who were temporarily unemployable owing to physical and moral deterioration. The Detention Colonies could not be expected to yield satisfactory results if they were handicapped with inmates of this kind, who belong rather to infirmaries than to workshops. Hence, in committing a physical wreck, incapable of immediate employment, the magistrates should have discretion to order the first part of his sentence to be passed in one of these Voluntary Institutions, where he would be able to receive more particular, and perhaps more sympathetic, treatment than would be possible in a hard-working Labour House. If, in the opinion of the authorities, the effect of this recuperative treatment made it unnecessary to pass the man, when fit, into a Detention Colony, there to complete his sentence, he would be released on parole, on the understanding that he would be liable to immediate reapprehension if his conduct gave rise to complaint. The Voluntary Colonies would continue to be managed as at present, but they would be entitled to grants of public money, the amount of which should be dependent less upon the exact number of cases received from the magistrates, than upon the rescue work of all kinds in which they were engaged, for this work is one of common advantage, and it is indefensible that the whole burden of cost should be borne by voluntary well-wishers.

Before leaving the question of repressive measures, it can hardly be superfluous to say that much could be done at once to discourage vagrancy and loafing if greater discrimination in almsgiving were shown. It sounds paradoxical, but it is true, that many of the people who, by their thoughtless doles, make loafers, are among the warmest friends of institutions called into existence for the one purpose of unmaking them. Nothing in the world is easier than to get rid of an importunate beggar by the gift of a coin; nothing is more difficult than to undo the harm which results, in most cases, from this open incitement to a life of idleness. To the average man all benevolence of this kind is a virtue; Emerson knew better when he spoke of the "vicious shillings" which he gave indiscriminately and against his better judgment. In Tudor times attempts were made by law to check almsgiving, insofar as it encouraged idleness and vagrancy;[50] and as late as 1744 (17 George II.) a law was passed exposing to a penalty of not less than 10s. or more than 40s. (or in default, one month's detention in a house of correction), any person who knowingly gave to a rogue or vagabond lodging or shelter and refrained from handing him over to a constable. Legislation of this kind is still in operation on the Continent. In 1889 the Canon of Schwyz, in democratic Switzerland, passed a law making "persons, who, by giving alms, favour begging from house to house or in the street," liable to a fine of 10 francs. Some time ago, also, a police ordinance was issued in the Uelzen district of Prussia, to the following effect:—

The legal prohibition in this country of indiscriminate charity, so called, even when offered to mendicants, and thus contributing to illegality, would nowadays be regarded as so serious an invasion of the "liberty of the subject" as to be inconceivable, and no writer who has a due reverence for that august principle would propose it.[51] Much may be done to discourage the practice, however, by educating public opinion to a recognition of the fact that only the philanthropy that is wise and well-directed can be truly helpful and beneficent.

The further question follows: What part, then, might the existing workhouse continue to play in our Poor Law system? In my opinion a part far more important than it has played in the past. For when the tramp and the loafer have been disposed of, there will remain the dependent and infirm poor, to the relief of whose needs it might, under improved conditions, be henceforth exclusively and more intelligently devoted. As, however, it would be no longer a workhouse, even to the extent of its casual wards, it would be expedient from every standpoint to discard for ever the hard name which it now bears, and to return to the earlier and less repulsive name of Poorhouse. One need not be very old to be able to recall the time when the name Bastille ("Basty," with a long "y," was the popular distortion of the word in my native Yorkshire), was the name by which the poorer classes universally expressed their horror of the workhouse: so much of modern French history had reached their contracted minds. That ill-repute has to some extent been outlived, yet the evil that institutions, as well as men, do lives after them, and an intense prejudice against the workhouse is still laudably common amongst the more deserving poor, and it will persist so long as the present name lasts, in spite of all that may be done to humanise our principles and methods of Poor Law administration. Poorhouses, of some sort, however named, we shall need to have so long as a Poor Law is necessary; and when the stigma has been removed from honest poverty, there is no reason to believe that the deserving recipients of public relief would show the old sense of humiliation and dread when necessity decrees their passage through portals which would no longer be those of hopeless indignity but of honourable comfort.

Happily, the improvement of these institutions proceeds apace, and to my mind the best thing is to continue improving them until they are good enough to serve as asylums for the most deserving of our aged and infirm poor, and infinitely too good for the idle and worthless. Several years ago the writer of the annual "Legal Poor of London" article in The Times called attention to the ameliorative influences which are so actively working in the metropolitan workhouses, and questioned whether too much was not being done for the inmates of these places:—

"For aged and deserving inmates," he said, "discipline is relaxed, the wards are made comfortable with carpets, window curtains, table covers, and arm chairs, and the cheery day rooms are supplied with literature, while a certain amount of privacy is allowed. The dietary has been improved, the electric light established, and warmth and comfort prevail, the inmates having no care as to the provision of maintenance. It is not surprising that they 'appear to appreciate' such attentions, nor is it matter for wonder that additions are made to their numbers. Nobody desires to see the poor, especially the aged poor, who are compelled to resort to the workhouse, treated otherwise than in a humane way; but sound views should prevail; and if we are to reckon the piling up of comforts in the workhouses as being 'so much to the good in the organisation of the life of the otherwise destitute poor,' we must be prepared to see thousands of ratepayers who are now less eligibly placed than the inmates of the workhouse, and whose burdens, in having to contribute to the maintenance of those inmates in greater comfort than themselves, are annually growing heavier, added to our present mass of indoor pauperism. Old age pauperism, encouraged by the altered conditions of the workhouses, has really become a serious question."

That is one aspect of the question, but there is another. The really pertinent point is, are the conditions of life nowadays prevalent in the workhouse in themselves too humane; do they go beyond the requirements of our modern civilisation? If not, there is no justification for holding the reforming hand. The right thing, surely, is to level up the conditions of life outside. Just as the admirable example set by so many public authorities in the treatment of their servants exerts a favourable influence in favour of employees in private service, so the standard of life insisted upon for the public workhouse, infirmary and asylum is bound to react upon the homes and habits of the independent labouring classes. If the workman who is taxed to keep the pauper in tolerable comfort does not enjoy at least equal conditions of existence himself, he will ask himself, and then others, the reason why. And who will blame him for so doing? Least of all the sociologist, who knows that no factor in the civilisation of society is more potent or more irresistible than the expansion of one's view of life and the multiplication of rational needs.

There remain the bona-fide seekers of work. For them no adequate provision exists, and the neglect to make it is a crying wrong. The present indiscriminate treatment of all wayfarers works unjustly in every way. It is unfair to the dissolute idler, whom it confirms in his sloth; it is monstrously unfair to the unwilling idler, whom it penalises for his misfortune. When society has done its duty to the tramp, it will not hesitate to recognise its responsibilities towards the genuine unemployed. It will do so not from motives of philanthropy alone, though it is a platitude to say that a society which professes to be based on Christian principles owes far more than it has ever paid or acknowledged to its workless members; it will do it also from considerations of social interest and well-being, recognising that it is the best charity and the truest economy to get an idle man's hands employed as soon as possible, the worst extravagance to allow him to remain unproductive a day longer than can be avoided. Labour is the first element in all wealth-creation, and every idle man is, in greater or less degree, a source of national impoverishment, for he is consuming without producing.

Wherever public labour registries have been established as part of a co-ordinated system, as in Bavaria and other parts of Germany, and in Switzerland, it has been found that, short of a free use of the railway, which is no doubt the ideal arrangement, hostels for decent wayfarers of the working class are essential. Those who think that such institutions are superfluous will do well to read the following story told by a working man correspondent in The Times:—

"Last summer some two hundred of us were given a week's notice, through slackness of work, by a powerful London company, and, although we all brought characters when we entered the company's service, we were informed on discharge that the company never gave references, and would not answer any letters with regard to our characters. Now, as everyone in London requires a personal character, unless we have influence at our back what chance have we for anything but casual work? One of the men, in despair of finding employment in London, left for the Lincolnshire potato harvest. He tells me that, not having money for all his journey, he walked down, and on several occasions had to put up at a casual ward, where he had to break 13 cwt. of stones in return for the shelter from the rain for the night. He says in some unions one has to lay on boards, with filthy rugs for bedclothes, and only dry bread to eat at meals, except at dinner, when you are allowed 1½ oz. of cheese. To avoid this organised charity he one night crept into a cart-shed. He was there found by the police, and by the goodness of the magistrates was sent on by train to Lincoln, and at the expense of the country provided with free board and lodge for fourteen days at the prison there. On being released he was fortunate enough to obtain work in the harvest fields, and being an all round good worker followed up a threshing machine all the winter till now. This is only one case, due entirely to the fact that many large firms will not give characters to men on discharge."

The incidents here recorded afford a striking illustration of a passage in the report of the Lindsey Quarter Sessions Committee on Vagrancy:—

"With regard to the man seeking work, your Committee are of opinion that the present methods of dealing with vagrancy constitute a real danger.... A certain number of such men find their way into our prisons owing to their failure to establish their bona fide character as working men before the courts. The temptation afterward to drift gradually into the ranks of the professional tramp class is considerable. Loss of manual or technical skill soon follows, and the man who ought to be a producer becomes a costly burden to the community."

To distinguish between the genuine work-seeker and the fraud would be no difficult task. All that would be necessary would be to require the former to authenticate himself by a way-ticket or pass, attested either by the police, a trade union, a labour bureau, or a recent responsible employer.[52] On the strength of such a certificate, which a bona-fide applicant should have a right to demand, unless good reasons existed to the contrary, he might well be allowed to proceed on his journey, and be admitted to such public hostels as happened to lie in his way. Vagabondage pure and simple would be a game no longer worth the candle. If the itinerant were an industrial malingerer, the fact would speedily come to light, and with no Poor Law to fall back upon, the sure prospect of detention in a Labour House would await him. The entire supplanting of the so-called "model" lodging-houses by travellers' hostels in public hands would be one of the greatest benefits that could be conferred upon the working classes.

It is worthy of note that the use of way-tickets, minus the houses of call now proposed, is not unknown to English legislation on vagrancy. So long ago as 1824 an Act was passed empowering magistrates to grant certificates or passes to vagrants discharged from prison, to enable them to reach their places of settlement, and to obtain relief from parochial authorities on the way, though this pass system appears to have been carried out in four counties only, and to have soon fallen into disuse. Further, a Minute of the old Poor Law Board, dated August 4, 1848, in recommending differential treatment as between the work-seeking and the work-shy wayfarer, urged, in particular, that the former should be helped by a system of way-tickets, applicable to fixed routes and valid for a definite period.

"There is obviously a wide distinction," said the Minute, " between those who are temporarily and unavoidably in distress and the habitual tramp or vagrant who simulates destitution; and one of the worst results of the present undiscriminating treatment of all who are commonly denominated 'casuals' is, that some of the most fitting objects of public charity are subjected to the discomforts that were intended to repel the worthless. Among all the unfortunate there are none whose destitution is more unquestionable, and whose hard lot presents stronger claims to sympathy, than the widow and orphan, deprived, at a distance from home, of their natural supporter, and the honest artisan or labourer who is seeking the employment of which accidental circumstances have suddenly deprived him. Yet, under the present system, such persons as these either share the discomforts, the filth, the turbulence, and the demoralising fellowship of the thief, the mendicant and the prostitute, who crowd the vagrant wards of the workhouses, or are compelled to brave the inclemency of the weather and the pains of hunger by reason of their unconquerable aversion to such companionship.

"It would not appear to be difficult to establish a system by which this deserving class of persons might be furnished with such evidence of their character and circumstances as might afford a fair presumption of the truth of their plea of destitution. A wayfarer of this class might, at the place where the cause of destitution occurs, be enabled by those who are cognisant of it to obtain a certificate from some proper authority, setting forth his name, the cause of destitution, and the object and destination of his journey. On his presenting this certificate at any workhouse, the master, on finding that it was satisfactory, that the applicant was on the road to his destination, and that he was without money or other means, might at once admit him, and supply him with the usual accommodation of the inmates. In this way the honest but destitute wayfarer, possessed of such credentials, would obtain the advantage of being admitted into the workhouse without reference to the relieving officer, and also of receiving better accommodation, than that at present afforded to him in the vagrant ward."

The plan proposed appears to have been followed but little. It was reported to the Poor Law Board in 1865 that it was in force in one county only (Essex), where vagrancy had been practically abolished as a result.

It is more to the purpose to know that, at the present time, way-tickets in a modified form are in use in some of the southern counties of England—Sussex, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Berkshire—and in parts of Wales. The best known system is that of Berkshire, which was adopted in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire in 1882, and is still in efficient operation. Its object is to enable a work-seeker to move through the county to his destination by the most direct route, and without unnecessary delay, and by providing him with lodging, supper, and breakfast at the casual ward, and with a mid-day meal on his going, to remove all necessity for begging from the public. The system was thus described to the Vagrancy Committee by Lieut. Col. J. Curtis Hayward, Chairman of the Gloucestershire Poor Law Vagrancy Committee:—

"A vagrant on entering the county gets a ticket from the assistant relieving officer who, in most cases, in our county is a police officer. That ticket has marked upon it his final destination and his description. With that he goes to the casual ward, where, of course, he is dealt with in the ordinary way; he gets his food night and morning and he has to do his task. When he leaves, the master puts on the ticket the name of the union which he has to go to next day—it must be on the road to his final destination—and also the name of a bread station. We have got one in nearly every case half-way. Sometimes he has to go a little out of his way to a bread station. It is also a police station. If he arrives there between one and three, he is given a ticket on a baker close by.

"If he arrives at the union entered upon the ticket that evening, he has what we call a good ticket; if, on the other hand, he arrives at some other union, or has no ticket at all, he is given a new one and it is considered a bad ticket. Our committee recommend the boards of guardians to detain, for one night only, all those who show they are passing as quickly as they can to the destination which they say they are going to; and to detain for two nights all those without any tickets, or who show that they are not going straight to their destination.

"For instance, supposing a man says, 'I am going from Gloucester to Cardiff,' he would have, perhaps, 'Westbury' marked on his ticket to go to; and suppose he turned up at Stroud, which is directly in the opposite direction, we would say:—'That is not where you are going to; this is a bad ticket; you must have a new ticket, and you will be detained two nights.'

"We give everybody a ticket. That is different to what they have done in Worcestershire and other places, where they do not give a ticket. They tried to discriminate between ... the bona-fide working men and those who were not bona-fide. We never attempt to make any distinction, because we say giving this ticket is taking away the excuse for begging; therefore, we say every man ought to have a ticket in his pocket."

The system in force in Wiltshire was described to the same Committee by Mr. A. C. Mitchell, Chairman of the Poor Law Vagrancy Committee of that county:—

"The system was shortly this—that on a tramp applying at the first union he arrived at in the county for relief, he was given a way-ticket on which was entered his description, his final destination, and the places where he would call. Arrangements were made at convenient places where a police constable was stationed, where the tramp could get bread between workhouses which necessitated a fair day's march. This ticket, as long as he proceeded in the direction to the final destination to which he declared himself to be proceeding, entitled him to eight ounces of bread (in Gloucestershire it was a larger amount at first, now it is eight ounces), between the hours of twelve and two at the given stations. As long as he kept on his way to his final destination that held good between union and union.

"The man is passed on from point to point, as long as he keeps on the route originally described, and he obtains his meals of bread at a given point in the middle of each day, between the hours of twelve and two.

"If that man varies his route, according to the recommendations of our committee—of course we cannot be responsible for the actions of boards of guardians—he would then be in the same position as the man who arrived without a ticket at all, and would be liable to full detention under the Casual Poor Act, 1882.

"We advise the boards of guardians that if a man has his ticket in order, he shall be forwarded on his road at the earliest possible time, after having broken the portion of stones for his one night's detention."

The same system is in operation in West and East Sussex, and as late as 1908 the Poor Law Inspector for those districts reported to the Local Government Board:—

"As regards vagrancy, the way-ticket system in operation in West Sussex is reported to be working well, and is looked upon as a permanent institution. It has also been extended to East Sussex. A considerable reduction took place in the number of vagrants relieved in Kent and Sussex."[53]

In the following chapters the measures which have been adopted in Continental countries for dealing with the social parasite will be considered in detail.

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