The Vagrancy Problem.
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Title: The Vagrancy Problem.
Author: William Harbutt Dawson
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VAGRANCY PROBLEM. ***
THE VAGRANCY PROBLEM
THE CASE FOR MEASURES OF RESTRAINT
FOR
TRAMPS, LOAFERS, AND
UNEMPLOYABLES:
With a Study of Continental Detention Colonies and
Labour Houses.
BY
WILLIAM HARBUTT DAWSON
Author of "The Evolution of Modern Germany,"
"German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle,"
"Prince Bismarck and State Socialism,"
"The German Workman," etc., etc.
London:
P. S. KING & SON,
ORCHARD HOUSE, WESTMINSTER.
1910
"In all ways it needs, especially in these times, to be proclaimed
aloud that for the idle man there is no place in this England of ours.
He that will not work, and save according to his means, let him go
elsewhither; let him know that for _him_ the law has made no soft
provision, but a hard and stern one; that by the law of nature, which
the law of England would vainly contend against in the long run, _he_
is doomed either to quit these habits, or miserably be extruded from
this earth, which is made on principles different from these. He that
will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his
necessity; there is no law juster than that....
"Let paralysis retire into secret places and dormitories proper for it;
the public highways ought not to be occupied by people demonstrating
that motion is impossible. Paralytic;--and also, thank Heaven, entirely
false! Listen to a thinker of another sort: 'All evil, and this evil
too, is a nightmare, the instant you begin to _stir_ under it, the
_evil_ is, properly speaking, gone.'"--_Thomas Carlyle_, "Chartism."
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE PROBLEM STATED 1
II. THE URBAN LOAFER 47
III. DETENTION COLONIES AND LABOUR HOUSES 62
IV. THE BELGIAN BEGGARS' DEPOTS 104
V. THE GERMAN LABOUR HOUSES 133
VI. THE GERMAN TRAMP PRISONS 147
VII. THE BERLIN MUNICIPAL LABOUR HOUSE 166
VIII. TREATMENT OF VAGRANCY IN SWITZERLAND 179
IX. LABOUR HOUSES UNDER THE POOR LAW 193
X. LABOUR DEPOTS AND HOSTELS 212
XI. RECOMMENDATIONS OF RECENT COMMISSIONS 229
XII. APPENDIX I.--THE CHILDREN ACT, 1908,
AND VAGRANTS 250
APPENDIX II.--SPECIMEN WAY TICKETS 253
APPENDIX III.--BELGIAN LAW OF NOVEMBER
27, 1891, FOR THE REPRESSION OF
VAGRANCY AND BEGGARY 257
APPENDIX IV.--REGULATIONS OF THE BERLIN
(RUMMELSBURG) LABOUR HOUSE 263
INTRODUCTION.
There is growing evidence that English public opinion is not only
moving but maturing on the question of vagrancy and loafing, and its
rational treatment. Foreign critics have maintained that we are slow in
this country to listen to new ideas, and still slower to appropriate
them, partly, it has been inferred, from aversion to innovation of
every kind, partly from aversion to intellectual effort. If a national
proneness to cautiousness is hereby meant, it is neither possible to
deny the accusation nor altogether needful to resent it. Yet while
this cautiousness protects us against the evil results of precipitancy
and gives balance to our public life, a rough sort of organic unity
to our corporate institutions and a certain degree of continuity to
our political and social policies, it has also disadvantages, and one
of the chief of these is that it has a tendency to perpetuate hoary
anomalies and to maintain in galvanic and artificial life theories of
public action which are hopelessly ineffectual and effete, if we would
but honestly admit it.
The principles which underlie our treatment of the social parasite
afford an illustration of our national conservatism. Alone of Western
nations we still treat lightly and almost frivolously this excrescence
of civilisation. Other countries have their tramps and loafers, but
they regard and treat them as a public nuisance, and as such deny to
them legal recognition; only here are they deliberately tolerated and
to some extent fostered. Happily we are now moving in the matter,
and moving rather rapidly. A few years ago it was still accepted as
an axiom by all but a handful of sociologists--men for the most part
regarded as amiable faddists, whose eccentric notions it was, indeed,
quite fashionable to listen to with a certain indulgent charity, but
unwise to receive seriously--that there was really only one way of
dealing with the tramp, and that was the way of the Poor Law. That
this was also the rational way was proved by the fact that it had been
inherited from our forefathers, and who were we that we should impugn
the wisdom of the past? And yet nothing is more remarkable in its way
than the strong public sentiment hostile to inherited precept and usage
which has of late arisen on this subject.
It is the object of this book to strengthen this healthy sentiment,
and if possible to direct it into practical channels. The leading
contention here advanced is that society is justified, in its own
interest, in legislating the loafer out of existence, if legislation
can be shown to be equal to the task.
Further justification this book will hardly be held to require at its
writer's hands, but a few words as to its genesis may not be out of
place. It is now some twenty years since I first directed attention to
the Continental method of treating vagrants and loafers in Detention
Colonies and Labour Houses. Repeated visits to institutions of this
kind, both in Germany and Switzerland, together with active work as a
Poor Law Guardian, only served to deepen my conviction that prolonged
disciplinary treatment is the true remedy for the social parasite whose
besetting vice is idleness.
At the Bradford Meeting of the British Association in September, 1900,
I read (before the Economic Section) a paper in which I developed, in
such detail as seemed suitable to the occasion, practical proposals
based, with necessary modifications, upon the result of a study of
Continental methods. This paper was published immediately afterwards
in abbreviated form in the _Fortnightly Review_, and was followed
a little later by a second article in the same place, in which the
proposals advanced were further elaborated. These proposals attracted
great attention at the time; in particular they were discussed by many
of the leading London and provincial journals, and it was encouraging
and significant that while the novelty of the ideas put forward was
admitted, they were all but unanimously endorsed by the Press and
by Poor Law authorities. It is desirable to say that the first three
chapters of the present book are based on, and to a large extent
embody, these writings of ten years ago, though much illustrative
evidence of a later date has been added; the remainder of the volume,
with the exception of one chapter, although dealing with phases of the
subject which I have frequently expounded before, is published for the
first time.
Nevertheless, two of the pleas originally put forward have now
disappeared from my argument, inasmuch as the measures to which they
related have, in the meantime, been realised--one, the establishment of
public labour registries, the other, the prohibition of child vagrancy,
which has been dealt with in that humane law the Children Act of 1908.
As a result of the more serious attention given to the vagrancy
question at that time, the President of the Local Government Board
in 1904 appointed a Departmental Committee of Inquiry, before which
I was invited to give evidence. The reader who takes up this book is
strongly urged to study the Report of the Departmental Committee as
well; it is a most able exposition of the vagrancy problem by serious
investigators who were less concerned to emphasise their individual
predilections than to help on the settlement of the question by uniting
on broad principles of procedure. As the thorough-going recommendations
of the Committee differ but slightly from the proposals which I
advocated before them and here repeat, the value of the present volume
will consist chiefly in the description which it contains of a series
of disciplinary institutions in which other countries are actually
carrying out the methods whose feasibility we are still discussing.
Pressure is happily come from other directions, and particularly
from the new school of Poor Law reformers. The publication of the
Reports of the Poor Law Commission begins a new era in the history of
public relief. The realisation of a constructive policy so large and
fundamental as that which the Commissioners have put forward will
probably prove to be the work of many years; yet whether our advance
on the lines suggested be fast or slow, it must be obvious to everyone
that the question of Poor Law reform is now a living one, and cannot
again fall into the background.
As regards the aspect of Poor Law administration with which this volume
is concerned, all those who have laboured as path-makers in this
undeveloped province of social experiment must derive satisfaction from
the fact that the Commission, simply endorsing the recommendations of
the Vagrancy Committee, regard the disciplinary treatment of loafers of
all kinds as an essential part of any reorganisation of the Poor Law.
For if the deserving poor, the genuine unemployed, and the hopeless
unemployables are to be treated more systematically and more humanely
in the future than they have been in the past, it will be impossible to
withhold from the loafers the special attention which they need.
Although the subject of vagrancy is necessarily approached in these
pages from the standpoint of repression, I should feel that my advocacy
had failed of its purpose if a change of the law simply stamped out
the tramp without making ample provision for the _bona-fide_ work
seeker. I urge the abolition of the casual wards, not merely because
they encourage vagrancy, but also because they are altogether unsuited
to the decent workers who are on the road owing to misfortune, and
not to fault. While accepting the Vagrancy Committee's conclusion
that the retention of the casual wards may be necessary by way of
transition, I look to the time when there will be provided for such
men in sufficiency, and as part of a national system, hostels or
houses of call offering on the easiest possible terms accommodation
superior to that of the shelter, the doss-house, or even the so-called
model lodging-house. This is done on a large scale in Germany and
Switzerland, and it is little creditable to us as an industrial nation
that we are so behindhand in a matter of such great social importance.
The new system of labour registries, by increasing the mobility of
labour, will probably help to bring home to the public mind the need
for these way-farers' hostels. With co-operation on the part of public
authorities, labour organisations, and private philanthropy the cost
should not prove deterrent, while the advantage would be incalculable.
_January 1, 1910_
W. H. D.
THE
VAGRANCY PROBLEM.
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM STATED.
There are two large sections of sociologists who to-day strongly
advocate, the one a radical reform of the Poor Law, the other the
reform of the Prison system. The modern Poor Law reformer would
administer public assistance with greater discrimination, showing more
consideration in the treatment of the unfortunate poor, more rigour in
the treatment of those whose destitution is deliberate and preventable,
more care for the children, with a view to helping them past the
dangers of demoralisation and lifelong intermittent pauperisation. On
the other hand, the prison reformer desires to see the punitive and
retaliatory aspect of imprisonment made subsidiary to the reformative,
or at least he would give to the latter greater prominence than it
receives at present.
Now that concerted endeavours are being made to place both Poor Law
and Prison in the crucible, with a view to recasting them in new and
improved forms, the time would appear to be specially appropriate
for filling up an important gap in our penal system dating from the
reorganisation of the Poor Law in 1834.
The reform which is urged in these pages appears to me to be the
missing link in that long and unique chain of laws and orders and
regulations which has in course of time been constructed for the
purpose of casting round the residual elements of society influences at
once repressive and benevolent, at once deterrent and remedial. While
some of these elements have received attention enough--not always wise,
perhaps, and often defeating its object--one element has never yet
been treated rationally and systematically. I refer to the large and
ever-growing class of idlers, who differ from the genuine unemployed in
that they will neither seek work nor accept it when offered: the drones
of the social hive, the habitual loafers.
We may distinguish in this parasitic class several clearly-defined
types.
(1) There is first the type with which we are most familiar--the nomad
of the highway, who is always in motion yet never gets to his journey's
end, the unmitigated vagabond, who lives by begging and blackmailing
and pillaging.
(2) There is also the settled, resident loafer--an urban type in the
main, though the country village knows him likewise--who haunts the
streets year in year out from morning till evening, living no one knows
how, and whose only purpose in life might seem to be to offer disproof
in his own obtrusive person of that saying of Adam Smith: "As it is
ridiculous not to dress, so it is in some measure not to be employed,
like other persons."
(3) There is also the intermittent loafer, three-quarters idler,
one-quarter worker of a sort, and altogether good-for-nothing, who
is almost invariably an inebriate and often has taken upon himself
domestic responsibilities which he saddles upon the shoulders of a
too-willing community--a character who mostly comes before public
notice in connection with Poor Law prosecutions for arrears of
maintenance.
(4) Not to exhaust the classification, there is a pitiable type for
which we must go to an almost hopeless class of the other sex, a type
which the Poor Law system knows likewise in connection with default
in parental obligations which, but for our exaggerated notions of
the limits of personal liberty, our laws would see to it were never
incurred. For the virtual encouragement which the Poor Law offers to
promiscuous, illegitimate, and irresponsible maternity amongst the
lowest class of society should shock the sense and excite the alarm of
all who are concerned for the moral and mental health of the race.
The idlers of the first two classes keep themselves most persistently
before the public gaze, but in any legislative treatment of their
shortcomings it is desirable that the other types should not be
overlooked, and in these pages the problem of the loafer is viewed as a
whole.
What society must do in its own interest, and in the interest of the
idlers themselves, is to stamp out, as far as well-devised laws can do
it--and we need not be too soft-hearted--the social parasite of every
kind. His existence is a positive injury to the State in every way; he
robs the State not only of the industry which he owes to it, but he
consumes the produce of other people's labour and renders it nugatory,
by abstracting from the wealth of society without adding to it; his
example scandalises honest workers, for while we preach industry and
thrift to the labouring classes, we assiduously foster a huge loafing
class, which preaches more eloquently on a very different text, viz.,
that it pays best to do nothing and sponge on the community; he is a
standing menace to public order and safety; and for society to tolerate
him is not merely to condone, injury done to itself, but absolutely to
place a premium upon social treason of a particularly insidious and
vicious kind.
It is only by the veriest abuse of the modern theory of personal
liberty that the Legislature, which is not slow to restrict the free
action of its citizens in so many ways, has hitherto thrown a paternal
and protecting arm over the loafer and the wastrel. For several
generations we have done little but pet and coddle the loafer; we have
treated his constitutional laziness not as the personal vice and social
crime which it is, but as a venial weakness to be excused and indulged,
while the man himself we have surrounded with a nimbus of maudlin
sentimentality.
Think what we do for the professional idlers. Take the urban type.
While honest men are working we give him the free run of our
thoroughfares, and set apart for him the best of our street corners.
Should he be a vagrant we make it possible for him to travel through
England from the Channel to the Tweed without doing one hour's serious
work save for the labour tasks which are imposed by some of the
workhouses at which he may call. In these institutions--erected at
intervals not too far distant to overtask his strength--food is placed
before him night and morning, with a bed thrown in; while outside he
can always rely upon the alms which he is able to draw from the pockets
of the unwisely charitable whom he deceives with his tales of misery,
or the unwillingly charitable whom he terrorises into compliance with
his demands.
This was not, of course, the old English tradition. The very earliest
of our Poor Laws drew a very clear distinction between the normal
poor--the "aged, poor, and impotent persons compelled to live by alms,"
as they are described in the Act of 1530--and the idle beggar and
vagabond. While provision was made for the due relief of the former,
penal measures were consistently directed against the latter.[1] And
when such methods of repression as the felon irons, the stocks, the
whip, serfage, and transportation no longer commended themselves to
the public conscience, there remained the method of summary despatch
home to the town or village of legal domicile in the custody of zealous
parish constables who relieved the monotony of their dignified calling
with many a pleasurable jaunt over country in those old leisurely
days. But the noteworthy thing about the old laws against vagrants
is that their uniform purpose--whatever their effect--was not the
mere restriction of this class within due numerical bounds, or the
regulation of its movements within decorous limits of liberty, but its
absolute extinction. In those brave days the idea of maintaining the
vagrant at the public expense, and of encouraging him in idleness and
vice, never occurred to the Legislature.
[Footnote 1: An Act of 1495 (11 Henry VII.) ordered local authorities
to search for all "vagaboundes, idell and suspecte persones lyvyng
suspeciously," to put them in the stocks for three days, giving
them bread and water only, and then to turn them out of the town or
township; failing their departure they were to be put in the stocks for
six days more, yet still they had to go.
An Act of 1530 (22 Henry VIII.), said in the preamble to be due to the
increase of vagrancy, and consequently of crime and disorder, enjoined
whipping as an alternative to the stocks, and extended the statute to
fortune tellers; a second offence by the latter was made punishable by
whipping on two successive days, three hours in the pillory, and the
loss of one ear.
An Act of 1535 (27 Henry VIII.) made further provision for the
able-bodied and infirm poor, but meted severer punishment to the
ruffler, sturdy vagabond, or valiant beggar, who on a second
apprehension might have the upper part of the right ear cut off, and on
conviction at Quarter Sessions of "wandering, loitering, and idleness,"
might be sentenced to death as felons.
The preamble of the Act of 1547 (1 Edward VI.) lamented that earlier
legislation on the subject of vagrancy "hath not had that successe
which hath byn wished, partelie by folishe pitie and mercie of them
which shoulde have seen the said godlie lawes executed, partelie by the
perverse nature and longe accustumed idlenes of the parsons given to
loytringe." Accordingly this Act provided that those who would not work
nor "offer themself to labour with anny that will take them according
to their facultie, and yf no man otherwise will take them doo not offer
themself to worke for meate and drynck," also those who ran away from
their employment, should be taken as vagabonds before two justices of
the peace, who might order them to be branded on the breast with a V
and "adjudge the said parsone living so idelye to such presentour to
be his slave" for two years. Should the slave run away during the two
years he was liable on recapture to be branded on cheek and forehead
with an S, and be adjudged a slave for ever, while to run away a second
time was felony punishable with death. If private persons failed to set
the law in motion the local justices were to do so.
In 1572 (14 Elizabeth) a law was passed enjoining that sturdy beggars
found begging should be "grevouslye whipped, and burnte through the
gristle of the right eare with a hot iron," unless some one would take
them into service for one year; a second offence was to be treated as a
felony unless some one would take them into service for two years; and
a third offence was made felony without benefit of clergy.
An amending Act of 1597 omitted the provisions as to branding
and ear-marking, but branding with a R in the left shoulder was
reintroduced for incorrigible or dangerous rogues in 1603 (1 James
I.). (Branding continued to be legal until 1713.) The Act of 1597 also
enjoined banishment for dangerous rogues who refused to reform their
lives, and an Order in Council of 1603 particularised the countries
to which they should be sent--East and West Indies, France, Germany,
Spain, and the Netherlands. The same power to banish was reasserted
by a law of 1662, the destination being now "any of the English
plantations."
One of the most sensible of the earlier repressive laws was that of
1702-3 (2 & 3 Anne) for the increase of seamen and encouragement of
navigation, which empowered justices of the peace to send rogues and
vagabonds to "Her Majesty's Service at Sea."]
We have so whittled down the laws on vagrancy and idleness, however,
that there are now only two ways in which it is possible to convict
and punish the tramp and loafer as such. The law regards as "idle
and disorderly persons" such persons, being able wholly or in part
to maintain themselves or their families by work or other means, who
wilfully refuse or neglect so to do, by which refusal or neglect they
or their families whom they may be legally bound to maintain become
chargeable to the public funds; also any persons wandering abroad or
placing themselves in public places, highways, courts, or passages,
to beg or gather alms, or causing or procuring children so to do,
and the penalty in such cases is imprisonment with labour up to one
calendar month, though should a fine be imposed instead of imprisonment
hard labour must not be adjudged for default in payment. The law also
regards as "rogues and vagabonds" such persons wandering abroad and
lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied
building, or in the open air or under a tent or in any cart or waggon,
not having any visible means of subsistence, and not giving a good
account of themselves, and the penalty is imprisonment with labour
for a period not exceeding three calendar months, though on a second
conviction such offenders may be imprisoned with hard labour as long as
one year.
So runs the law, and in theory it does not seem ineffectual; in
practice it is wholly so. For the penalties visited on "rogues and
vagabonds" are virtually annulled by the care which the Poor Law has
taken to allow these offenders to evade apprehension. A vagrant may
be as "idle and disorderly" as he likes by day, so long as he pursues
his irregular life undetected but at night he has only to present
himself at the handiest workhouse, and he is forwith certified to be a
deserving citizen, and is lodged and fed at the public expense.
And even about the enforcement of the penal provisions against the
tramp, when his native wit and cunning fail him, and he is caught
in the meshes of the law, there is an unreality and a frivolity
which brings both the statute and its administration into disrepute.
Nine-tenths of the "idle and disorderly persons," of the "rogues and
vagabonds," who come before the justices of the peace are hardened
offenders, who know more about the county gaols of the country than
the most experienced of Prison Commissioners; yet the view which
most commonly prevails in the police courts is that so long as the
itinerant mendicant is sent on his way, and is thus got safely out of
the district, expedience if not justice is satisfied. To be fair to our
justices, it should be remembered that this blind-eyed administration
of the law is no modern innovation. It is really only a survival of
the ancient custom, already alluded to, of harrying vagabonds from
parish to parish--often after a rigorous application of the whip, but
in any case after a blood-curdling warning from the local justice,
duly followed by a special commination from the parish constable on
his own account--lest they should by any mischance fall upon poor
funds to which they had no domiciliary claim. The result, however, is
the same now as of old. The tramp takes his admonition, and, if need
be, his punishment, with stoical indifference, and continues a tramp.
The offence is condoned or corrected, as the case may be, but the
offender knows that he is free to commit it again--at his peril, of
course--directly the law has done with him, and that in the bathroom of
the casual ward he may each evening purge the day's offences, and so
begin anew on the morrow his career of licensed crime.
Who shall wonder, then, that our past indulgent treatment of the
vagrant has had the effect of perpetuating and multiplying this class?
The dictum of wise Sir Matthew Hale, uttered just two and a half
centuries ago, is as true to-day as ever: "A man that has been bred up
in the trade of begging will never, unless compelled, fall to industry."
As for the casual ward itself, it was to a large extent an accident
of legislation, and certainly it was not contemplated when the Poor
Law was reformed in 1834. The great constructive measure of that
year, introducing the existing type of workhouse, made no reference
to vagrants. The Act presupposed only the relief by the new Boards of
Guardians of the settled poor. "But," the Departmental Committee on
Vagrancy write, "when workhouses had been established vagrants applied
for admission to them, representing themselves to be in urgent need of
relief. The masters of workhouses had no means of investigating the
facts and had to deal with each case on their own responsibility. At
that time workhouse inmates who had no settlement were maintained at
the expense of the parish in which the workhouse happened to be; this
made the relief of the vagrant in the workhouse more difficult, and
workhouse masters were pressed by the Guardians to refuse such cases
altogether. In 1837 the Poor Law Commissioners, on being appealed to by
the Commissioners of Metropolitan Police with regard to the question,
expressed the opinion that it was the intention of the Act that all
cases of destitution should be relieved, irrespective of the fact that
the applicant might belong to a distant parish. They stated that it
was the duty of the relieving officer to relieve casually destitute
wayfarers and of the workhouse master to admit such cases to the
workhouse. These cases were distinguished from beggars by profession,
who were to be dealt with under the Vagrancy Act of 1824."[2] In 1838
the Commissioners issued instructions to the Boards of Guardians in
the Metropolis pointing out their duties in regard to the relief of
the casually destitute, and suggesting the adoption of arrangements
for securing the performance by them of task work, and the following
year a further Circular threatened with instant dismissal officers who
neglected to relieve cases of urgent casual destitution. In this way
the right of the vagrant to admittance became asserted: "as a class
vagrants came to be recognised by the Central Authority, who from this
time issued a series of circulars and orders dealing with them directly
or indirectly." As a natural result between 1834 and 1848 vagrancy
increased to an alarming extent in all parts of the country.
[Footnote 2: Report, Vol. I., p. 9.]
It is interesting to recall the fact that as late as 1840 the Poor Law
Commissioners, though the vagrancy evil was steadily growing, were
"convinced that vagrancy would cease to be a burden if the relief given
to vagrants were such as only the really destitute would accept."
Hence they recommended that the Central Board should be "empowered
and directed to frame and enforce regulations as to the relief to be
afforded to vagrants." An Act of 1842 empowered Boards of Guardians
to prescribe a task of work for persons relieved in the workhouse "in
return for the food and lodging afforded," though no one was to be
detained against his will for more than four hours after breakfast on
the morning following admission, which meant that the casual might
do little or much, according to his whim. The same year the Poor
Law Commissioners ordered the setting apart of separate wards for
casuals, prescribed special diet for them, and regulated the task-work
system. Meantime, the vagrant proved himself more and more the master
of the Board of Guardians; his claim to relief having been admitted,
he settled down to the view that the casual wards were convenient
houses of call, intended the better to facilitate his roaming life,
and this view was implicitly accepted by Poor Law authorities. More
than anything else, therefore, the casual ward is responsible for the
present perplexities of the vagrancy problem.
One of the first acts of the new Poor Law Board of 1848 was to inquire
into the extent of the casual pauper nuisance and the causes of the
abuse of casual relief; and overlooking the fact that the Boards of
Guardians had been forced to accept the vagrant against their will,
it blamed these bodies and told them that a remedy must be sought
"principally in their own vigilance and energy." Among the measures
recommended were (1) the refusal of relief to able-bodied men not
actually destitute; (2) the employment of police officers as assistant
relieving officers for vagrants, and (3) the adoption of a system of
passes and certificates (restricted as to time and route) to be issued
"by some proper authority" to persons actually in search of work. The
first two of these recommendations were widely acted upon, though lack
of uniformity in policy seriously hampered the efforts of those Boards
of Guardians which honestly tried to do their duty.
Of the later measures introduced in the vain hope of checking vagrancy
three are specially noteworthy:--
(1) A Poor Law Board Circular of 1868 and a General Order of 1871
recommending the introduction of the separate cell system.
(2) The Pauper Inmates Discharge and Regulation Act of 1871 empowering
Boards of Guardians to detain casual paupers for the following times:
If a pauper had not previously been admitted within one month, until
11.0 a.m. on the day following admission; if he had already been
admitted more than twice within a month, until 9.0 a.m. on the third
day after admission. The Casual Poor Act of 1882 extended the periods
of detention as follows: First admissions during the month, until
9.0 a.m. on the second day following admission; second and further
admissions during the month, until 9.0 a.m. on the fourth day.
(3) An Order of December 18, 1882, making admission to a casual ward
dependent upon the order of a relieving officer or an assistant
relieving officer, except in urgent cases. In effect it is well known
that nearly all cases are urgent.
Considering now the extent of the vagrant population, using the
term in its wider signification, and not confining it to the casual
paupers[3] who are particularly enumerated in Poor Law statistics,
the admission must be made at the outset that the data available are
very inconclusive. It seems desirable first to call attention to the
limitations of strictly official information on the subject. Since 1848
a count of the vagrants relieved in casual wards has been made by order
of the Local Government Board on January 1 and July 1 in each year;
since 1890 there has also been a count of vagrants relieved on the
nights of January 1 and July 1; and since 1904 a count has been taken
each Friday night.
[Footnote 3: "Casual pauper" is defined in the Pauper Inmates Discharge
and Regulation Act of 1871 as "any destitute wayfarer or wanderer
applying for or receiving relief" in the casual wards.]
According to the Annual Report of the Local Government Board for 1908
the average number of casual paupers relieved in England and Wales on
each Friday night of that year was 11,491, comparing with an average of
10,401 for the year 1907; the maximum number was 13,798 on August 22
and the minimum 8,341 on July 4. The average relieved on Friday nights
in London alone during the year was 1,114. A further return of the
number of persons in England and Wales in receipt of relief on January
1, 1909, shows that the casual paupers numbered 15,852, 1,420 being
relieved in London unions and 14,432 in provincial unions. As to these
numbers, however, the Local Government Board state:--
"These are the total numbers of casual paupers entered in the returns
as relieved on January 1, 1909. The total number relieved on the night
of January 1, was 9,747. To what extent the former totals include
twice over persons who received relief in more than one union on the
same day is not ascertainable, and it is possible that the total of
the paupers relieved on the night of January 1, although omitting many
casual paupers who, after their discharge from the workhouse in the
morning, did not again have recourse to the Poor Law on the same day,
is the more reliable."[4]
That the vagrant population, even enumerated in this partial manner, is
increasing is shown by the following table, showing for a period of ten
years the number of casuals relieved during day and night on January
1:--
---------+--------------------------
| Casual Paupers Relieved.
+-------------+------------
Year. | At any time | On the
| during | night of
| January 1. | January 1.
---------+-------------+------------
1899 | 13,366 | 7,499
1900 | 9,841 | 5,579
1901 | 11,658 | 6,795
1902 | 13,178 | 7,840
1903 | 14,475 | 8,266
1904 | 15,634 | 8,519
1905 | 17,524 | 9,768
1906 | 16,823 | 9,708
1907 | 14,957 | 8,346
1908 | 17,083 | 10,436
---------+-------------+------------
It would appear from these figures that a certain relationship exists
between vagrancy and trade cycles. Of the years of maximum vagrancy,
1904, 1905, and 1908 were years of more or less acute unemployment,
while those of minimum vagrancy, 1900, 1901, and 1902, were years of
good or fairly good trade. That the fact of an inter-relationship
between vagrancy and the state of trade cannot be pressed unduly,
however, is proved by the comparatively narrow limits within which,
allowing for increase of population, the figures move. Certainly the
figures afford no _prima facie_ justification for supposing that trade
depression causes any considerable number of genuine workmen to join
the highway population.
[Footnote 4: "Annual Report" for 1908, p. 10.]
Poor Law statistics, however, fail entirely to do justice to the extent
of the vagrancy problem. They show the number of vagrants relieved at
one time and in one way only; but all vagrants do not receive public
help at the same time, and the total number on the road is far larger
than the number who call at the workhouses. As to this the testimony
of Poor Law Inspectors and all who have studied the vagrancy question
at close quarters is unanimous. "A very large number, probably the
majority, of vagrants seldom come to the vagrant wards," wrote Mr. J.
S. Davy, as Poor Law Inspector for Sussex, Kent, and part of Surrey.[5]
"It ought to be remembered," says another Inspector, "that the vagrants
admitted to the vagrant wards represent only a very small percentage of
the vagrants of the country."[6]
[Footnote 5: Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1902-3, p.
57.]
[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, Report of Mr. P. H. Bagenal, p. 147.]
The Departmental Committee on Vagrancy of 1904 endorse this view:--
"The returns of pauperism published annually by the Local Government
Board give figures relating to casual paupers, that is, vagrants
relieved in casual wards, but these represent only a small portion of
the total number of vagrants.... The vagrant is to be found in many
places--on the road, in casual wards, common lodging houses, public
or charitable shelters, and prisons, besides which he has many other
resorts, such as barns, brickworks, etc. Then, again, the number of
homeless wayfarers varies greatly from time to time, and at different
periods of the year, owing to conditions of trade, the state of the
weather, or the attraction of seasonal employments."[7]
[Footnote 7: Report of Departmental Committee on Vagrancy, Vol. I., p.
16.]
Although a simultaneous census of the entire vagrant population has
never been taken, certain data exist which furnish the basis for at
least an approximate estimate. Several of these will be mentioned.
(1) Up to 1868 yearly returns were collected by the Home Office from
the different police forces of England and Wales showing the number of
vagrants of all kinds known to them. The number on the latest date,
April 1, 1868, was 38,179, against 32,528 on April 1, 1867. The number
of persons relieved in the casual wards of the country on January
1, 1867, was 5,027, and on January 1, 1868, 6,129, showing that the
"casual paupers" at that date represented only about one-sixth of the
total vagrant class. If the same proportion to population still held
good to-day the number of vagrants of all kinds, based on the mean
of the known number of casual paupers on January 1 of the five years
1904-8, viz., 9,355, would be about 56,000.
(2) In the county of Gloucester a count has been made for many years on
a night of April of the numbers sleeping in casual wards and in common
lodging houses, and the results show that the lodging-houses contain
five times as many vagrants as the casual wards. Allowing for vagrants
who sleep out of doors, the ratio would not seriously differ from that
shown by the police enumeration already mentioned. Applying to the
whole country the number of vagrants per thousand of the population of
Gloucestershire, the nomad army would be shown to be 30,000. It should
be remembered, however, that Gloucestershire is a county of small
towns, and lies away from the great streams of population; hence it
should not feel the full effect of the vagrant movement.[8]
(3) An enumeration made on March 17, 1905, by the chief constable
of Northumberland, by means of police officers placed at the most
important points, of vagrants on the roads between the hours of 7.0
a.m. and 7 p.m. gave a total of 300 (exclusive of Newcastle and
Tynemouth), equal to about 1 per 1,000 of the population of the area
covered. On this basis he placed the number of vagrants in England
and Wales at 36,000. Here the omission of two important towns largely
invalidates computation; their inclusion would unquestionably give a
much higher ratio.
[Footnote 8: "In point of distribution through the country vagrancy
is found to cling to the Metropolis and its neighbourhood, and to the
manufacturing and coal and iron mining districts; it follows also the
track of the navvy when any new works of importance are in progress."
Report of Poor Law Commission, Vol. II., pp. 161, 162.]
(4) A careful census of vagrants, beggars, migratory poor, etc., is
taken by the police for each county, city, and burgh police district in
Scotland on two nights in the year, in June and December, showing the
number of these persons in (1) prisons or police cells, (2) homes and
refuges, hospitals and poorhouses, (3) common lodging-houses or other
houses, (4) public parks, gardens or streets, outhouses, sheds, barns,
or about pits, brick and other works. The two counts of 1908 gave the
following result:--
Men. Women. Children. Total.
June 21 6,815 1,843 1,541 10,199
December 27 6,129 1,391 986 8,506
This was equal to 2.1 and 1.8 per 1,000 of the population respectively,
and if these ratios were applied to England and Wales they would
represent aggregates of 76,000 and 63,000.
(5) An enumeration of homeless persons in the administrative County
of London, made by the London County Council on the night of January
15, 1909, showed a total of 2,088. On that night there were also
1,188 persons in the casual wards of London, and 21,864 in the common
lodging-houses and shelters, of whom 10 per cent. were supposed to
belong to the vagrant class. This would give a total of 5,462 vagrants
as follows:--homeless (sleeping out and walking the streets), 2,088;
in casual wards, 1,188; in common lodging-houses and shelters, 2,186;
total, 5,462. As the population of the administrative County of London
at the date named was estimated at 4,795,757, this total is equal to a
ratio of 1.14 per 1,000 of the population. The same ratio for England
and Wales would give a vagrant population of about 41,000.
(6) Dr. J. R. Kaye, Medical Officer of Health for the West Riding
of Yorkshire, in a report upon the influence of vagrancy in the
dissemination of disease, published in 1904, estimated the roving
population at 36,000. He has, at my request, explained the basis of his
calculation as follows:--
"The estimate of 36,000 refers to England and Wales, and it includes
the inmates of casual wards and nomads of the same class who inhabit
alternately the casual wards and the common lodging houses according
to the state of their pockets. The county police here (West Riding),
make an annual census of tramps, and the figure comes out at about
1,000 persons, of whom about 200 are in the casual wards on any given
night. Now the Local Government Board reports give the casual-ward
population of England and Wales at about 10,000, so that if the same
proportions hold good there should be about 50,000 wanderers. Or, on
the other hand, if you take our ascertained 1,000 in the county area
in relation to our population of 1,249,685, and apply the ratio to the
population of England and Wales, we get a figure of 26,000. My figure
of 36,000 comes about mid-way between the two estimates given above."
(7) A final estimate which may be quoted is that made at the request
of the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy on the night of July 7,
1905, by the various police forces in England and Wales of persons
without a settled home or visible means of subsistence: (_a_) in common
lodging-houses; and (_b_) elsewhere than in common lodging-houses or
casual wards. The result was as follows:--
(_a_) In common lodging-houses 47,588
(_b_) Elsewhere than in common lodging-houses
or casual wards 14,624
______
62,212
These totals were made up of:--
(_a_) (_b_)
Men 41,439 10,750
Women 4,869 2,436
Children 1,280 1,438
______ ______
47,588 14,624
In the opinion of the Vagrancy Committee, a considerable deduction must
be made from the number returned for common lodging-houses, though, on
the other hand, it appears from some of the returns that many vagrants,
who would otherwise have been in tramp wards or common lodging-houses,
were at the time engaged in temporary work such as fruit-picking and
harvesting, and so were not included in the count. Further, an addition
of about 10,000 is necessary to include the vagrants in casual wards.
The Committee came to the conclusion that the census could not be
accepted as "a trustworthy guide to the actual number of vagrants," and
their Report contains the following guarded verdict:--
"The number of persons with no settled home and no visible means of
subsistence probably reaches, at times of trade depression, as high a
total as 70,000 or 80,000, while in times of industrial activity (as
in 1900) it might not exceed 30,000 or 40,000. Between these limits
the number varies, affected by the conditions of trade, weather,
and economic causes. In our Inquiry we are more concerned with the
habitual vagrant, that is, the class whom trade conditions do not
affect. Of this class there is always an irreducible minimum, though
successive depressions of trade may increasingly swell the numbers. No
definite figures as to this permanent class can be obtained, but we
are inclined to think that the total number would not exceed 20,000 to
30,000."[9]
[Footnote 9: Report of Vagrancy Committee, Vol. I., p. 22.]
It may be added that the estimates of the vagrant population made by
witnesses who gave evidence before this Committee ranged from 25,000 to
70,000.
The mean of all the seven estimates put forward above, as
approximations only, is about 50,000, which is probably below rather
than above the actual number in normal times. The estimates differ so
widely, however, as to shake one's faith in the possibility of arriving
at a safe figure except by a special census on even more comprehensive
lines than those which underlay the Home Office enumerations up to 1868.
But even when the casual wards, model lodging-houses, shelters, and
other resorts of the roaming poor have been enumerated, the full extent
of the vagrant population is not told.
According to a statement made by the Prison Commissioners to the
Vagrancy Committee, 3,736 out of 12,369 convicted male prisoners on
February 28, 1905, were, in the opinion of the prison governors,
"persons with no fixed place of abode and no regular means of
subsistence"; and of 2,595 convicted female prisoners, 372 answered the
same description. In other words, one-fourth of the prison population
belonged at that date to the vagrant and loafing class.
The prosecutions in England and Wales for vagrancy offences in the
narrower sense--begging, sleeping out, misbehaviour by paupers, and
theft or destruction of workhouse clothes--fluctuated as follows during
the ten years 1898-1907:--
---------------------------------------------------------------
| | | | Theft or
Year. | Begging. | Sleeping-out. | Misdemeanour | Destruction
| | | by Paupers. | of Workhouse
| | | | Clothes.
------|----------|---------------|--------------|--------------
1898 | 15,474 | 9,582 | 3,769 | 589
1899 | 12,659 | 8,515 | 3,632 | 615
1900 | 11,339 | 7,452 | 3,717 | 457
1901 | 14,492 | 9,101 | 5,118 | 576
1902 | 16,184 | 9,598 | 5,959 | 726
1903 | 19,283 | 10,349 | 6,496 | 841
1904 | 23,036 | 11,785 | 7,436 | 937
1905 | 26,386 | 12,636 | 6,314 | 1,005
1906 | 25,083 | 11,540 | 5,176 | 1,016
1907 | 23,023 | 11,164 | 4,633 | 852
---------------------------------------------------------------
At whatever figure we place the vagrant population, there is little
doubt that the number tends to increase. The Vagrancy Committee frankly
accept this view.
"The army of vagrants has increased in number of late years," they
state, "and there is reason to fear that it will continue to increase
if things are left as they are. It is mainly composed of those who
deliberately avoid any work, and depend for their existence on
almsgiving and the casual wards; and for their benefit the industrious
portion of the community is heavily taxed. We are convinced that the
present system of treating casual paupers neither deters the vagrant
nor affords any means of reclaiming him, and we are unanimously of
opinion that a thorough reform is necessary."[10]
[Footnote 10: Report of Vagrancy Committee, Vol. I., p. 1.]
As to the class of men who frequent the casual wards the great mass,
both in town and country, are unquestionably unskilled labourers,
though nearly all trades contribute a share, larger or smaller, to
the sum total of vagrancy. A classification of the men relieved in
the casual wards of Hitchin and Brixworth during twelve months ending
September, 1906, showed the following result:--[11]
--------------------------+----------+-----------
Occupations. | Hitchin. | Brixworth.
--------------------------+----------+-----------
Labourers | 3,830 | 222
Painters | 226 | 14
Grooms | 157 | 12
Bricklayers | 144 | 12
Shoemakers | 133 | 13
Fitters }| | 9
Rivetters }| 123 | --
Boilermakers }| | --
Tailors | 108 | 5
Carpenters and joiners | 106 | 9
Printers and compositors | 74 | --
Stokers, firemen, etc. | 70 | 3
Seamen | 60 | 4
Moudlers and drillers | 58 | --
Gardeners | 37 | --
Clerks | 36 | --
Engineers | 34 | --
Bakers | 33 | --
Harnessmakers and saddlers| 31 | --
Porters | 27 | --
Blacksmiths, etc. | 25 | --
Sawyers | 25 | --
Plasterers | 24 | --
Masons | 22 | --
Silversmiths | -- | 3
Other trades | 446 | 16
+----------+-----------
Total | 5,829 | 322
--------------------------+----------+-----------
[Footnote 11: Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1906-7, pp.
292, 293.]
The following classification of the casuals admitted into the wards of
a rural union, unnamed, is published by the Poor Law Commission:--[12]
-----------------------------------------------
Occupations. | 1905. | 1906. | 1907.
--------------------|--------|--------|--------
Navvies | 552 | 772 | 613
General labourers | 404 | 485 | 489
Carters | 62 | 56 | 61
Carpenters | 42 | 6 | 37
Masons | 38 | 42 | 48
Grooms | 37 | 40 | 60
Seamen | 34 | 28 | 48
Fitters | 24 | -- | 20
Shoemakers | 23 | 24 | 36
Firemen | 15 | 21 | 31
Tailors | 13 | 16 | 11
Gardeners | 12 | 12 | 8
Miners | 12 | -- | --
Bakers | 4 | 13 | 13
Clerks | 11 | 8 | 38
Ironmoulders | 11 | 5 | 16
Blacksmiths | 9 | -- | 13
Other occupations | 142 | 57 | 69
Professional tramps | 70 | 25 | 66
|--------|--------|--------
Total | 1,512 | 1,610 | 1,673
-----------------------------------------------
[Footnote 12: Report, Vol. III., p. 507.]
Of 450 men admitted into the casual wards of the Skipton-in-Craven
workhouse during the period September 1 to November 12, 1904, 50 were
aged and infirm, while 250 described themselves as general labourers,
and 150 as tradesmen.
The classification of the latter was as follows:--
Tailors 30
Joiners 15
Mechanics 12
Bricklayers 12
Painters 12
Masons 12
Spinners 12
Weavers 12
Butchers 9
Colliers 8
Printers 8
Shoemakers 8
It must be granted, of course, that every highway wanderer is
not a loafer, and that the workhouse casual ward itself offers a
rude hospitality to many a decent wayfarer who is deserving of a
better fate, though a good deal of misapprehension exists on this
subject. There is no means of learning the percentage of _bona-fide_
work-seekers amongst that section of the vagrant population which
fights shy of poor relief, but when one enters the casual ward it is
possible at once to divide the sheep from the goats. Those who theorise
upon the basis of intuition, and much more those who confuse the voting
of other people's money with Christian charity, are apt to conclude
that, as a matter of course, the casuals "in a lump" are not "bad,"
but only unfortunate, and deserve all such relief as is afforded them.
It would be futile to deny to the most habitual of vagrants the power
to impress even the case-hardened listener by fiction which is a good
deal stranger than truth, by doubtful emotions and still more doubtful
morals. Let appeal be made, however, to the trained observation of the
Poor Law clerk and the weather-beaten soul of the workhouse master,
and a different story will be learned. Some years ago I questioned all
the Poor Law authorities of Yorkshire on the subject; half the answers
placed the number of the genuine work-seekers at 5 per cent. of the
whole, though in special cases a much higher percentage was allowed.
The Vagrancy Committee, on the evidence placed before them, estimated
the proportion of genuine work-seekers at 3 per cent. of all casual
paupers.
These figures are in keeping with all we know of the experience of
the Poor Law Inspectors who report from year to year to the Local
Government Board upon the vagrancy question. To quote one opinion only
by way of illustration:--
"The more I see of the vagrant class the more strongly I am impressed
with the conviction that the number of those really in search of work
is relatively very small. Over and over again I have gone into the
casual wards and have, in answer to my question, been told by the
vagrants that they were all seeking work but could not find any; but
when I have pointed out that farmers were everywhere advertising for
hands, they had nothing to say, except, perhaps, that farm labour
did not suit them. In the agricultural districts it may be said,
generally, that enough labourers can rarely be obtained, and the local
newspapers are scarcely ever without advertisements for them. No doubt
some of the able-bodied paupers know nothing of farm work, and if they
can be enticed to labour colonies, which would teach them, agriculture
may gain, but there is a large demand for absolutely unskilled men
which they refuse to supply. For example, last summer, a tradesman in
a small town in Somerset asked the master of the workhouse to send him
half-a-dozen labourers, to whom he would give permanent employment
for 18s. a week. Six of the occupants of the casual wards professed
themselves as eager to accept this offer, but, on leaving the
workhouse in the morning, all but one slipped away. That one remained,
and has been earning his 18s. a week ever since, but the other five
have presumably found begging more profitable."[13]
[Footnote 13: Annual Report of the Local Government Board for 1902-3;
report of Mr. H. Preston Thomas upon the counties of Cornwall, Devon,
&c., pp. 164, 165.]
The Local Government Board, as we have seen, have endeavoured to check
vagrancy by urging Boards of Guardians to adopt the cell system, and
to impose upon the casuals systematic labour tasks proportioned to the
frequency of their visits. Yet though the cell system has been pressed
upon workhouse authorities since 1868, so far only two-thirds of them
have adopted it. As to the labour task, the Local Government Board
advise that vagrants should, as a rule, be detained for two nights and
required to perform a full day's work, but that the period of detention
should be extended to four nights in the case of those who seek
admission twice within the same month.
There is no general practice to this effect, however, for every union
follows its own devices for making the life of the tramp hard or easy
as the case may be, and in the absence of a uniform policy, few unions
take the question of vagrant regulations seriously. The average Board
of Guardians attacks all its problems on the line of least resistance,
and the line of least resistance in dealing with the tramp is to follow
the advice of the incomparable constable Dogberry, and get him out of
sight as soon as possible, thanking God that it is rid of a knave.
The reports of Poor Law Inspectors have for years abounded with
complaints of absence of uniformity in the treatment of vagrants and of
the evil results of the existing state of anarchy. To quote several of
recent date:--
"While many unions have adopted the Local Government Board's
suggestions, others have ignored them. It is useless for one union to
take steps for driving casuals away from their workhouses simply to
plant them on others."[14]
"There is a want of uniformity as regards detention and the task of
work in the various casual wards, and it is worthy of notice that at
Loughborough, where the guardians, after a short trial of two nights'
detention, decided to revert to a one night's detention only, the
number of vagrants has increased from 10,751 in 1906 to 12,058 in
1907."[15]
"There is a great want of uniformity in the treatment of vagrants
as regards accommodation, detention, diet and tasks of work, and
guardians are naturally averse to taking any action involving expense
pending legislation on the subject."[16]
"Some mitigation of the evils of vagrancy might be possible if
guardians fully exercised the powers possessed by them. No uniform
practice prevails. The system of a two nights' detention, with the
imposition of an adequate task, is uncommon in this district. Some
kind of task is prescribed in the majority of vagrant wards, but
for the most part vagrants are released the following morning after
admission. Here and there the regulations are enforced with beneficial
results. Guardians are, perhaps, apathetic or disinclined to detain
more often, because they are not enabled to deal effectively with this
class owing to insufficient accommodation. A system of two nights'
detention, combined with proper discretion and supervision on the part
of the workhouse master, has generally been followed by a diminution
in the number of vagrants, but an absence of any such similar practice
in neighbouring unions largely defeats these good results. Vagrants
simply avoid these wards, and pass on to those where the restrictions
are less severe."[17]
[Footnote 14: Mr. G. A. F. Hervey, writing of Norfolk and Suffolk.
Report for 1902-3, p. 67.]
[Footnote 15: Mr, G. Walsh, reporting on Leicestershire, Lincolnshire,
etc. Report for 1907, p. 332.]
[Footnote 16: Mr. R. J. Dansey, writing of the Midland Counties. Report
for 1908, p. 71.]
[Footnote 17: Mr. G. Walsh, writing of the counties of Leicester,
Lincoln, Nottingham, etc. Report for 1908, pp. 77, 78.]
As the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy say:--
"It is much easier for a workhouse master, or the superintendent
of the casual ward, to allow vagrants to discharge themselves on
the morning after admission without labour, than to detain them,
and insist upon their doing the regulation task of work, and the
discretion which is left to the officers with respect to the discharge
of certain classes of vagrants results in a complete variety of
practice."[18]
[Footnote 18: Report, Vol. I., pp. 32, 33.]
Again:--
"Where a union carries out the regulations as to detention and task
of work there is always a reduction in the number of admissions to
their casual wards, but the evidence before us shows that severity
of discipline in one union may merely cause the vagrants to frequent
other unions."[19]
[Footnote 19: _Ibid._, Vol. I., p. 28.]
In London, according to the evidence given before that Committee:--
"Some guardians do not detain, some give one task, some another, and
some practically none at all.... Some Boards of Guardians say the
casuals are working-men honestly looking for work, and there is no
doubt they are, but they know where they are going to get it. When
they leave, they know to what casual ward they are going, and whether
they are going to break stones or pick oakum. The consequence is, that
the London vagrants flock to Poplar, Thavies Inn, and the other wards
where detention and work are not enforced, or where only a light task
is given."[20]
[Footnote 20: Report, Vol. I., p. 30.]
All experience shows that the frequency with which vagrants visit given
parts of the country is in exact proportion to the comfort or otherwise
of the casual wards, and a change either way means a difference in the
number of loafers entertained. "If a tramp likes the ward he is there
again within the month, and perhaps in a fortnight," was the verdict of
a witness before the Poor Law Commission.
"The slightest relaxation with reference to the quantity or quality of
food given in workhouses leads immediately to an increase of vagrants,"
writes a Poor Law Inspector.[21]
[Footnote 21: Mr. J. S. Davy. Report of the Local Government Board for
1902-3, p. 57.]
Another Inspector, explaining decreases in the numbers of vagrants in
some of his districts, says:--
"A small cause will apparently divert the vagrant stream from its
usual course. Where a change of master has taken place, or where gruel
has been substituted for bread and water, or _vice versa_, there has
frequently occurred, very rapidly, a large increase or decrease in the
numbers applying for admission to the casual wards where these changes
have taken place."[22]
[Footnote 22: Mr. J. W. Thompson. Report for 1908, p. 43.]
An illustration of tramp susceptibility to the attractions of
the dietary is related by the Poor Law Inspector for Cumberland,
Lancashire, and Westmorland, as follows:--
"In 1908 ... the guardians of the Leigh Union decided in the autumn
to make an improvement in the dietary at their casual wards, a
proceeding in which they did not invite the co-operation of other
Boards of Guardians. The result was an influx of vagrants into the
union, which swamped the accommodation, and rendered administration
impossible. The admission to the Leigh casual wards for the first six
months of the year had shown an increase of 33 per cent., as compared
with 1907; in the second half of the year, the comparative increase
was 164 per cent. The comparative increase for the latter half year in
Lancashire as a whole was under 30 per cent., and none of the unions
adjoining Leigh showed an increase greater than 60 per cent."[23]
[Footnote 23: Mr. A. B. Lowry, Local Government Board Report for 1908,
p. 82.]
Only those who have had practical experience of Poor Law work know
how fastidious the tramp is in the choice of his involuntary tasks.
In connection with the casual wards of a Board of Guardians of which
I was for many years a member the task imposed was breaking 13 cwts.
of stone. We added to this task the riddling and wheeling away of the
stone. The result was that many tramps would come to the door, read
the regulations, and walk off, while others, who entered and asked
what they would have to do, would at once leave with "No, thank you."
Several tramps resolutely argued the illegality of the extra task with
the master, and tried to evade it.
It may be said that the case advanced against the vagrant up to this
point rests upon negative grounds. Even were he an idler and a parasite
and nothing worse, however, he has no claim to be tolerated. Those who
tell us that vagabonds and loafers form, after all, an insignificant
proportion of the population, and that the Poor Law holds out severer
problems for our solution, forget or undervalue the fact that every one
of these people is a centre of moral contagion. To ignore them because
they are a small minority in society is just as rational as it would
be to ignore gangrene because its effects are local only, or a plague
because its victims are as yet few in number. Each of these loafers
creates imitators. On the highways he is a walking advertisement of the
advantages of idleness; in the model lodging-house, the night shelter,
the wayside inn, he acts the part of recruiting sergeant for the great
army of sloth and vice.
The vices of the vagrant, however, are by no means all of a negative
order. From the standpoint of public security and order it is
intolerable that the known criminals, which the majority of tramps
are, should be afforded every facility for following their irregular
calling. Incidents like the following, cited at random, are of weekly
and almost daily occurrence in all parts of the country, and bring
home better than argument the folly of our present method, or lack of
method, of treating the tramp and loafer:--
"An attack on a lady in a lonely country road, between the Potteries
and Leek, has been reported to the local police. The lady, who lives
near Dunwood Hall, had been visiting an invalid, and on her way home
was waylaid by a tramp, who attempted to rob her. A severe struggle
took place, during which the lady was viciously handled. In the end
the tramp was frightened by something and decamped."
"At the Mansion House, a plasterer was charged with vagrancy and
assault. On Tuesday night the prisoner knocked at the door of St. Mary
Aldermary Rectory, and applied for assistance. The rector's butler,
after consulting the rector, told him to go away, whereupon he struck
him in the mouth, cutting it, and loosening two of his teeth. The
rector went to his man's assistance, and the prisoner placed himself
in a menacing attitude and attempted to strike him, saying that he
would have his rights. The prisoner placed his shoulder against
the door and prevented it being shut. Ultimately he was given into
custody.... Sentenced to six weeks' hard labour."
The reports of Poor Law Inspectors frequently illustrate this aspect of
the vagrancy problem. To quote from one only:--
"Another aspect of vagrancy, peculiar to rural districts, is the
sense of insecurity which is created in the minds of people living in
remote localities. Sometimes methods of threats and intimidation are
resorted to enforce demands when it is safe to do so. Truculent and
insubordinate, as is proved by his frequent appearances before the
magistrates for refusing to perform his allotted task, he is a burden
to the community, and a nuisance alike to the police and to the Poor
Law authorities."[24]
[Footnote 24: Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1908; report
of Mr. G. Walsh for Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, etc., pp. 78, 79.]
The laxity with which the law against mendicancy is enforced is
notorious, and upon this question also the reports of Poor Law
Inspectors contain interesting reading. "It is impossible," wrote Mr.
J. S. Davy several years ago, "to deal adequately with the question
(of vagrancy) without having regard to the mode in which the police
carry out their obligations under the statute, and the action of
magistrates when vagrants are charged before them. There are obvious
difficulties in the way of the police laying too much stress either
on the apprehension of beggars or the prevention of sleeping out, and
these difficulties affect magistrates, who occasionally discourage the
police from proceeding against offenders under the Vagrancy Act."[25]
[Footnote 25: Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1902-3, p.
57.]
Another Poor Law Inspector wrote in 1906:--
"With regard to the punishment of vagrant offenders, it is very
unfortunate that there is so little uniformity in the sentences in
Leeds. While the stipendiary magistrate gives, as a rule, lenient
sentences, the West Riding magistrates deal more rigorously with those
who come before them. There seem to be no fixed principles governing
the cases."[26]
[Footnote 26: Mr. P. H. Bagenal in Annual Report of the Local
Government Board, 1906, p. 337.]
The following extract is taken from a Yorkshire newspaper of April,
1903:--
"Three labourers of no fixed abode (it is the police constable's
well-known euphemism for a vagrant), were charged at Skipton with
begging at Kelbrook. The prisoners fairly took the village by storm.
They were singing and shouting, and swore at women who would not
relieve them. One of them kicked a door, and their conduct generally
was altogether disgraceful. After they had collected 3-1/2d., they
went to the public-house and asked to be supplied with a quart of beer
for that amount. The girl who was in supplied them for the sake of
quietness, and after drinking the beer the men went out, collected the
same amount, came back, and demanded another quart for 3-1/2d. The men
were sent to gaol for fourteen days each."
Very outrageous, of course, yet very common, and also very natural. For
given the implicit licence to beg, why not give the tramp also the
licence to spend the proceeds of begging in his own way, and if he gets
drunk and is violent, is it not the fault of those who furnished the
money? But "fourteen days!" There is the true irony of the incident.
For the same men probably served fourteen days a month before, and
would serve fourteen days a month later, since the vagrant's time is
notoriously divided pretty equally between the gaol and the highway.
If, however, our penal laws are intended to be not merely punitive, but
also, and mainly, reformatory, a system which consists of sending men
into and out of prison at more or less regular intervals is obviously
futile and childish. It is the obligation to work which these men, and
tens of thousands like them, need to come under. Dislike of regular
labour makes them tramps, tramping makes them criminals--the two
conditions are inseparably connected as cause and effect, for their
kinship lies in the very constitution and instincts of human nature,
and the police laws which ignore it are engaged in an encounter from
which they must of necessity emerge foiled and beaten. They may hide
the tramp for a time from view, but they will not cure him; the very
iteration of the futile penalties which are imposed upon him only
confirms him in the conviction that vagrancy, mendicancy, rowdyism,
and blackmailing are venial offences, the commission of which society
almost takes for granted, since it has arranged that they may be
compounded for upon terms so easy as to amount to open incitement to
illegality.
"Evidence is available on all hands, both from magistrates and from
those connected with the administration of the Poor Law," the Vagrancy
Committee of the Lincolnshire Quarter Sessions of 1903 write, "that the
present short-term sentences, especially in view of the improved prison
dietary, are a treatment of no deterrent value.... If the present
methods are not deterrent, the evidence is also clear that neither are
they reformatory. If the man _bona-fide_ out of work and seeking work
be excluded, a very large proportion of those convicted for vagrancy
are found to be habituals. Many of these cases are either mentally or
physically below the normal standard, and it is obvious that such cases
cannot be successfully dealt with during the very short periods for
which they are brought under the prison influence."
The Committee cite one notorious case in which between December 8,
1881, and October 23, 1903, a period of under twenty-two years, a man
of thirty-seven years had been sentenced to imprisonment thirty-one
times in Lincolnshire, and after he had done all continued an
unprofitable servant. His sentences were as follows:--
Sentence of seven days 5 times.
" ten days 2 "
" fourteen days 9 "
" three months 12 "
" six months 1 "
" twelve months 2 "
An interesting feature of these sentences was the way in which shorter
and longer sentences alternated. In another case a man of thirty years
had been sentenced twenty-three times within five years, _viz._,
between July 14, 1898, and June 29, 1903, as follows:--
Sentence of seven days 6 times.
" ten days 3 "
" fourteen days 4 "
" one month 2 "
" six weeks 1 "
" three months 5 "
" six months 2 "
To quote the words of the Prison Commissioners:--
"The elaborate and expensive machinery of a prison, whose object is to
punish and at the same time to improve by a continuous discipline and
applied labour, cannot fulfil its object in the case of this hopeless
body of men who are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and who, from long
habit and custom, are hardened against such deterrent influences as a
short detention in prison may afford."[1]
Moreover, our medical authorities are at last on the track of the
tramp, and none too soon, for several recent epidemics have convinced
them that he is one of the most proficient disseminators of disease.
The following incidents, all relating to the last wide-spread epidemic
of small-pox, are typical of his services to society in this respect:--
[27]"A tramp who was making his way through the Lake District was
found lying by the roadside near Ullswater on Sunday evening in an
advanced state of smallpox. He was removed to a smallpox hospital, and
it was ascertained that he had been infected by another tramp, who is
now in the Penrith Hospital." (_March 5, 1903._)
[Footnote 27: Report for the year ended March, 1905.]
"At Northwich three more begging cases were dealt with. The chairman
said tramps were mainly responsible for the smallpox prevalent in the
district. Cheshire was infested, and if vagrancy could be put down
they intended to do it."
"Smallpox has broken out in a somewhat serious form at Barking, and
several families have been removed to the isolation hospital. The
outbreak is attributed to a tramp, who was found lying in the roadway
at Ripplesdale with a severe attack of the disease."--(_May 19, 1903._)
How disease is disseminated by tramps is graphically told in the
following newspaper paragraph relating to the epidemic above referred
to:--
"On December 20, 1902, a tramp named ---- entered Doncaster Workhouse.
He said he came from Worksop way; had been sleeping out; had not
had any food for three days; and complained of aches and pains all
over him. He was isolated as much as possible in an end ward of the
Workhouse Infirmary. On December 26, he was found to be suffering
from small-pox, and immediately removed to the Small-pox Hospital.
Four inmates who had been in contact with the case were isolated and
re-vaccinated, and a nurse, also re-vaccinated, was told off to attend
to them, and not allowed to go near the other inmates.
"On January 8, a second case of small-pox occurred in the workhouse.
This inmate, it appears, had sorted the clothing of the first case.
He complained of illness on January 4, and developed the disease
on January 8. The amount of trouble that was given in isolation,
re-vaccination, and disinfection must have been very considerable, and
must all be debited to the tramp who introduced the disease."
The report for 1903 of Dr. J. R. Kaye, the West Riding of Yorkshire
Medical Officer of Health, stated:--
"Yorkshire towns have had such a visitation of smallpox, that we read
with interest the part played by the tramp genus in spreading it. Last
year there were 144 cases of the disease in the West Riding. In nearly
every centre affected, the tramp was responsible for its introduction.
Thus we find at Keighley, where the greatest number of cases occurred,
the infection was brought by a man who had been 'on tramp' seeking
employment. The 15 cases at Barnsley were attributed to tramps of the
lodging-house class. A recent investigation has shown that out of 138
towns having cases of small-pox, in no less than 100 its introduction
was attributed to persons of the same class. At Sheffield, out of 28
importations, 21 were brought about by tramps, and at Huddersfield,
8 out of 13 invasions were traced to similar channels. It is
significant, that in districts away from the main roads trodden by
these nomads, small-pox was unknown. Clearly something will have to
be done with this highly objectionable person if we are not to have
small-pox always with us."
In a paper on "Tramps and the Part they Play in the Dissemination of
Smallpox," read in July of the same year at the Sanitary Institute's
meeting, Dr. Kaye said:--
"In the recent prevalence of small-pox, some 12,000 cases have
occurred in the provinces (since January, 1902), and experience all
over the country shows that the most subtle agency of distribution
is not to be found in the close commercial intercourse of our
communities, but in the wanderings of the relatively insignificant
number of people whom we designate tramps."
As a result of the discussion which followed, it was resolved to
request the Government to "take into consideration the necessity for
legislation to deal more effectually with those resorting to common
lodging-houses and workhouse tramp-wards, as a constant and dangerous
element in the propagation and dissemination of smallpox."
The following year Dr. H. E. Armstrong, Medical Officer of Health
for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, published an elaborate report on the same
epidemic, based upon inquiries addressed to the Medical Officers of
Health throughout the country. As a result of the epidemic, which began
in the latter part of 1901, and lasted the two following years, 25,341
cases occurred. As to their origin, Dr. Armstrong came to the following
conclusions:--
(1) Of the 126 districts from which returns were received, 111 had
been invaded by small-pox in the epidemic, and in 57 or 51 per cent.
of these, the disease was first introduced by vagrants. In 25 of these
latter districts spread of infection from vagrants occurred.
(2) Small-pox was introduced secondarily by vagrants into 58
districts, and, perhaps, into two other, at least 305 times. Such
secondary introductions of infection took place with the following
frequency:--
Number of Times Number
Infection was of
Introduced. Districts.
1 11 or 12
1 or 2 1
2 11 or 12
3 5
4 5
5 3
6 3
7 2
8 7
9 7
9 or 10 7
11 7
12 7
13 7
23 4
24 4
31 4
34 4
(3) It was found that the vagrants were housed in the workhouse in 41
districts, and in common lodging-houses in 58. The number of cases
of small-pox occurring in these lodging-houses was 'at least 606,'
and probably more, though 19 districts reported that the disease was
introduced into common lodging-houses (169 with 165 cases) otherwise
than by vagrants.
(4) In 35 districts there was reason to believe or suspect that
infection had been carried elsewhere by vagrants leaving those
districts--in most cases twice or more.
(5) Infection was first introduced by vagrants into 58 per cent. of
the 63 large towns to which the inquiries extended, and was carried
sooner or later into 72 per cent. of these towns, and on an average
about five times to each. The disease had been taken to 30 workhouses
and about 70 common lodging-houses, causing a large number of fresh
cases, but had been of comparatively slight prevalence in such houses
when not brought there by vagrants.[28]
[Footnote 28: Report on Small-pox in relation to Vagrancy in England
and Wales during the year 1903, by Dr. H. E. Armstrong, Newcastle.]
So, too, at the meeting of the Sanitary Institute, held on February 7,
1903, at Manchester, Dr. E. Sergeant, Medical Officer of Health to the
Lancashire County Council, reported that "The spread of smallpox was
owing most largely to the vagrant class," and he claimed that "these
parasites should not be allowed to go about the country spreading
disease, and it was very little to ask that they should be vaccinated,"
for it seems that under present legislation, while the parasite can
require you to support him, you cannot require him to protect himself,
much less you, against infectious disease!
Furthermore, guardians of the poor have become increasingly alive to
the fact that one of the most difficult tasks which they have hitherto
had to discharge, in the administration of the existing law, will
compel them before long to face this wider problem: I refer to the
question of child vagrancy. For oftentimes the tramp has both wife and
children, and unless a benevolent public interposes and relieves him of
their maintenance, they accompany him on his wanderings. Passing over
the humane aspect of the question, I would ask: What does this ghastly
parody of family life mean? It implies that where there is one vagrant
now there will in all human probability be two, three, four, a few
years hence. Calling attention to the fact that during the year 1908
3,899 children were admitted to vagrant wards, the Report of the Local
Government Board remarks:--
"Debarred from education and all that is essential to the formation of
settled habits, they are subjected to great hardships, and it would be
strange if, under such conditions, they did not become bound to the
road."[29]
[Footnote 29: Annual Report for 1908, p. 79.]
Our forefathers recognised three and a half centuries ago that vagrancy
was hereditary, for an Act of 3 & 4 Edward VI. (1550), reciting that
"many men and women going begging carried children about with them,
which, being once brought up in idleness, would hardly be brought
afterwards to any good kind of labour or service," gave _carte
blanche_ to any person willing to appropriate such children and bring
them up to honest labour till the age of eighteen years if boys, or
fifteen if girls. It may be said that this was legalised kidnapping,
and that our modern way of dealing with the children of tramps is
better. For we have got so far as to recognise that the liberty of
vagrant parents to drag their offspring round the country is a vicious
liberty, and should not be tolerated, though we are not agreed on
preventive measures. The Poor Law Acts of 1889 and 1899 empower Boards
of Guardians, under certain specified circumstances, to assume and
exercise parental rights over the children of pauper parents, and the
Children Act, 1908, prohibits child vagrancy under penalty, and makes
provision for placing in public or other suitable custody the children
of persons who are unfit to discharge parental duty.[30] These statutes
do not interfere with parents' liability to maintain their children,
though in other hands, yet the enforcement of that liability will
prove difficult, if not impossible, in the case of a vagrant. Unless
such a parent voluntarily abandoned a roaming life, the Poor Law and
police authorities would have to choose between the alternatives of
perpetually chevying him from pillar to post or letting him go scot
free. Obviously, legislation which leaves the question of parental
responsibility in so unsatisfactory a position cannot be the final word
on the child vagrancy problem.
[Footnote 30: The passages in which the question of child vagrancy was
dealt with ten years ago have been modified, owing to the passing of
the Children Act, 1908, yet important though the provisions of this
statute are, they are no final solution. Extracts from the Act are
given in Appendix I., pp. 251-253.]
Viewing the question of vagrancy from all sides, we shall be compelled
to endorse the verdict of the Lindsey Quarter Sessions Committee:--
"The cost to the community of this class is immense, for they produce
nothing, they necessitate large additions to our workhouses, involving
heavy cost to the rates, and they overcrowd our prisons. At the same
time they form a ready recruiting ground for the criminal classes,
they are a continual nuisance to rich and poor alike, and they leave
behind them families worse than themselves."
CHAPTER II.
THE URBAN LOAFER.
The vagrant is only one type of social parasite, however, and in
some respects he is not the most obnoxious. When we leave the casual
wards and enter the workhouses themselves, a further loafing element
confronts us, adding to the difficulty of our problem. For though these
institutions nominally exist for the reception of people who are not
only destitute but are unable to prevent their destitution, we find
that the able-bodied pauper is to a large extent in possession.
It is interesting to recall the fact that when workhouses were
established, the tendency which the Poor Law authorities fought against
was, that the aged and infirm of the labouring class regarded them as
infirmaries for their permanent maintenance. A Report of the Poor Law
Commissioners of 1840 protested against the idea that workhouses should
be placed on the same footing as almshouses.
"If the condition of the inmates of a workhouse," they wrote, "were
to be so regulated as to invite the aged and infirm of the labouring
classes to take refuge in it, it would immediately be useless as a test
between indigence and indolence or fraud--it would no longer operate
as an inducement to the young and healthy to provide support for their
later years, or as a stimulus to them, whilst they have the means, to
support their aged parents and relatives. The frugality and forethought
of a young labourer would be useless if he foresaw the certainty of a
better asylum for his old age than he could possibly provide by his own
exertions...."
Nowadays, the difficulty of Poor Law Guardians is to prevent, not the
aged and infirm, but the middle-aged and able-bodied from making the
workhouse their permanent home.
"Once admitted into the workhouse in England," says the Majority Report
of the Poor Law Commission, "the pauper is usually left undisturbed,
the Guardians seldom exercising their power of discharge." This
generalisation is unjust, yet what is said certainly holds good of a
large number of workhouses. While, however, Boards of Guardians are
mainly to blame, the laws which they have to administer are also, in
part, responsible. In the absence of institutions for the detention of
loafers such as exist in Continental countries, these loafers are able
to abuse the Poor Law at will, and snap their fingers at the police.
Within the workhouse they are a cause of perpetual annoyance, and
their presence and example are a fruitful source of demoralisation and
disorder.
Speaking of this class of able-bodied paupers in relation to the
Sheffield Union, Mr. P. H. Bagenal, Poor Law Inspector for the West
Riding, reports:--
"The master states that this class gives infinite trouble. They have
no fear of prison; in fact many of them prefer it, and state that the
work is not so hard and the food better. Many of them have got good
trades, such as fitters, plumbers, builders, iron workers, etc., and
could earn from £3 to £4 a week if they chose. They prefer to go to
the workhouse, where, however, they only work under compulsion, and
give all the trouble they can to the officers."
Commenting upon the fact that of the persons relieved in England and
Wales during the year ending September 30, 1907, 26,179 had been
relieved five times or more, the Poor Law Commission state:
"The number of persons ascertained to have been relieved five times or
oftener during the year shows the existence of a troublesome class who
make a convenience of the workhouse, and whose improvidence is born of
the knowledge that that institution is always at hand."[31]
[Footnote 31: Report, Vol I., p. 42.]
The Poor Law Inspector for the Metropolis relates that, as a result of
a call-over of the 900 inmates of a London workhouse in 1907, it was
found that fifty able-bodied men and fifty-three able-bodied women were
among them. The Committee reported:--
"In a large number of these cases there did not seem to be any
tangible reason why they were in the workhouse at all.... Many
admitted that they had done no work for years; in fact could not give
the date or place where they had last worked. Many of this class were
so reduced in physique on admission that they could not be classed as
able-bodied, but with the regular diet and absence of intoxicating
liquors they rapidly recovered; but unfortunately for the worst
classes the conditions of the house appear to be conducive to their
disinclination to shift for themselves.
"Upon such cases again coming before the committee, it was found that
several inmates, who appeared to be quietly settling down for the
remainder of their lives, had awoke to the fact that the guardians
were making investigations, and had taken their discharge."
The Committee were also impressed by the number of men who
"When their wives refused to keep them longer, and as some of them
openly expressed it 'the wife turned me out,' came to settle down in
the house--in many cases drink and desertion were found to be the
causes of the wives' action."[32]
[Footnote 32: Annual Report of Local Government Board, 1907; report of
Mr. J. S. Oxley, Inspector for the Metropolis, etc.]
Mr. Lockwood, another Poor Law Inspector, stated before the Poor Law
Commission:--
"Probably, if it is an overcrowded workhouse, it is impossible to
prevent the able-bodied class from sharing in the comfort, and I may
say the luxuries of the older ones.... You cannot prevent that class
finding the conditions of life in a mixed workhouse such as they are
not entitled to, and ought not to share in."
Another witness, speaking of the Marylebone Workhouse, said:--
"The association in large numbers in the able-bodied blocks becomes
an attraction; and it appears to me that some method of breaking up
such associations, accompanied by systematic training under healthy
conditions, would be advantageous.... The master feels very strongly
that what the men require is to be given continuous work, which they
are able to do, and to be separated the one from the other. They
regard the workhouse as a kind of club house in which they put
up with a certain amount of inconvenience, but have very pleasant
evenings."[33]
[Footnote 33: Evidence before Poor Law Commission, Q. 16,686.]
It was stated that the Marylebone workhouse deals with 300 of these men
every week.
The master of the Bethnal Green workhouse confirmed what has been said.
"This class of man," he said, "is well known to the master of every
London workhouse as the able-bodied loafer. As a rule he is a strong,
healthy fellow, knowing no trade, having a great dislike to work, and
possessing all the attributes of the soft-shelled crab, willing to
live upon the fruits of the labour of the worker, so long as he can
avoid the sharing of responsibility himself. There is no doubt that
the moment this man becomes an inmate, so surely does he deteriorate
into a worse character still. Unless rigorously dealt with and made to
work under strict supervision, he has a fairly good time in the house,
and after a month or so he has mastered every trick of the trade, and
becomes a confirmed in-and-outer, taking his day's pleasure by giving
the necessary notice, and returning the same evening more contented
than ever with his lot in the house. Something for nothing is degrading
the man, until all of the manhood has left him, and there remains for
the ratepayers to keep an idle, dissolute remnant."
To quote another witness, who referred specially to the Poplar Union:--
"The pauper in the workhouse intends to be there; he is either going
to be there or in some other institution all the days of his life.
My experience is, that the average have been in from ten to twelve
years, and some of them nineteen years, and they are young men now.
The workhouse is no deterrent to any man. It simply harbours them, and
as long as the workhouses exist, these men will exist."
Similarly, the report of the Stepney Guardians for 1908 states:-
"There are too many opportunities in a general workhouse for
the vicious of both sexes to meet. The dining hall and other
parts of the workhouse common to all classes afford means of
communication--generally of an evil character. It is no uncommon event
for a man and woman to strike up an acquaintance in a workhouse,
which ultimately results in increased burdens on the ratepayers.
Messages are conveyed, _billets doux_, ill spelt but tender, are
exchanged; an assignation is made, resulting in the amorous couple
leaving the workhouse together when, dispensing with the blessing
of the Church on their union, they tramp the countryside as man and
wife during the summer months. At the approach of winter the man
returns, with a sigh of relief, to his old bachelor quarters in the
workhouse, where the gleeful account of his exploits is listened to
with open-mouthed admiration by the youthful male pauper, and with
envy by the hoary sinner. In this manner, a feeble-minded woman and a
physically enfeebled man--both chronic paupers and chargeable to this
union--begat five children, all of whom were born in the workhouse,
and were reared at the expense of the ratepayers."
The same testimony comes from rural districts. "It is certain," Mr. B.
Fleming, the Poor Law Inspector for Dorset, writes, "that the tendency
has been to induce the loafer class to think that they would have
provision made for them, and that therefore they need not trouble much
about it for themselves."[34]
[Footnote 34: Report of Local Government Board for 1907, p. 312.]
Writing of the "in-and-out" class of workhouse inmates, the Poor Law
Commissioners say:--
"It is not too much to say that this class has been created by our
administration of the Poor Law, while the law itself affords no means
of checking it now that it has come into existence. These are the men
and women who frequent the workhouse for short periods, often taking
their families with them, and are constantly taking their discharge.
They go out when they want more licence, and return when they need to
recruit themselves after a debauch."[35]
[Footnote 35: Report, Vol. II., p. 278.]
Moreover, the married urban loafer, like the married vagrant, inflicts
incalculable injury upon others. While it has been made a misdemeanour
to drag children round the country, the pauper of the "in-and-out"
type can still with impunity commit a crime no less outrageous
upon the offspring for whose decent maintenance he is legally and
morally responsible. For the children of such intermittent paupers
are introduced to workhouse life and breathe the atmosphere of
pauperisation from their earliest consciousness. When the father enters
the house, the children go with him, and for them, as for him, life is
an alternation of abject dependence and equally abject liberty.
"Through these children," says the Report of the Poor Law Commission
truly, "the evil (of pauperisation) is being perpetuated to another
generation, for they get no chance of education, while they become
habituated to constant appeals to the Poor Law, and lack the
advantages of either home or school life."[36]
[Footnote 36: Report, Vol. II., p. 279.]
As a Poor Law Guardian, I had to do, on one occasion, with an
able-bodied pauper of this kind, who, on the ground of destitution,
obtained admittance to the workhouse with his large family. Once
in, he was so satisfied with his new surroundings and freedom from
responsibility, that for many months it proved impossible to dislodge
him. Under the master's eye he was willing to do the work required of
him, but he had no wish to find employment outside, and did not leave
the house until he was literally ejected.
It is true that the Poor Law Act of 1899 gives power to Boards of
Guardians to appropriate neglected children, and so preserve them from
the ill effects of their vicious training.[37] That is undoubtedly
kind to the child, and in the end it is bound to be advantageous to
the public. But here comes in an absurd anomaly: Whatever the theory
of the law may be, we practically leave it to the option of the
parents to evade responsibility or not as they will. All they have to
do is to make themselves scarce, and the Poor Law officials and the
police may find them or they may not. I know of one Union in whose
workhouse there are, at the moment of writing, six children of one
father, and he an able-bodied man, who has fled from the district
once, and only refrains from doing so again because he knows that he
is under strict police supervision. Rousseau deposited his offspring
on the steps of the Foundling Hospital at dead of night, and went
away, thinking noble thoughts, for this was a part of the harmonious
"Social Contract," and everybody else could do the same. The English
loafer yields his children to workhouse care with but the gentlest
pretence of unwillingness, and betakes himself to liberty, lightened
of a disagreeable burden, and reflecting that of all strange devices
for relieving him and his kind of parental responsibility and of
encouraging the multiplication of paupers, the Poor Law is the
strangest.
[Footnote 37: The Poor Law Act of 1899, amending an Act of 1889,
provides that a child maintained by a Board of Guardians may be taken
into the guardians' control until it reaches the age of eighteen years,
the guardians acquiring all rights over it meanwhile, if the child has
been deserted by its parent, if the guardians think that the parent,
by reason of mental deficiency or vicious habits or mode of life, is
unfit to have control of the child, if the parent is unable to perform
his or her parental duties by reason of being under sentence of penal
servitude or of being detained under the Inebriates Act, 1898, or the
parent has been sentenced to imprisonment in respect of any offence
against any of his or her children, or the parent is permanently
bed-ridden or disabled and is an inmate of the workhouse and consents
to the guardians so acting, and if both the parents (or in the case of
an illegitimate child the mother of the child), are dead.]
Prosecution for maintenance, if the offender can be found, and a short
imprisonment if he refuses to pay, are the corrective measures already
available against the parents who culpably transfer their parental
liabilities to the public, and over 3,000 convictions are registered
yearly by the courts for neglect to maintain family.[38] It is
notorious, however, that proceedings of this kind are taken by Poor
Law authorities reluctantly, since the magistrates in many districts
habitually stretch the law in favour of defaulting parents. What we
should do, and shall have to do, in such a case, is to take the loafer,
too, and after disciplining the idleness out of his nature, give him
back his family obligations, and see that he discharges them.
[Footnote 38: The figures for six years are as follows:--1902, 2,832;
1903, 3,187; 1904, 3,235; 1905, 3,266; 1906, 3,095; 1907, 3,041.]
Furthermore, in all large towns a considerable proportion of the
frequenters of the casual wards are not even _bona-fide_ vagrants, but
simply idlers of the locality, who, so long as these refuges exist,
feel no disposition to work and establish homes for themselves. Of the
men admitted to the casual wards of the Manchester and Chorlton Unions
in a certain year, no fewer than 4,000 were found on analysis to belong
to the neighbourhood. The experience of Birmingham is to the same
effect. Of the London casual it has been said:--
"He is in most cases a loafer who simply migrates from one
ward to another. He is in Whitechapel to-night, and in St.
George's-in-the-East to-morrow night, and he will go across to
Kensington the next night, but he does not leave London.... They have
their times for excursions, when they go either to the seaside or
hop-picking or fruit-picking, but for the greater part of the year
they are in London, and they circulate round about the casual wards."
The number of admissions to the Metropolitan casual wards in 1907 was
196,470; the number of separate individuals was not known, but 18,009
persons were identified as having been admitted more than once during
a month. The Report of the Vagrancy Committee states, indeed, that 98
per cent. of the persons admitted to the casual wards of London are
loafers. A witness stated before that Committee:--
"They are not working men. If you give them a job for a day or two
days perhaps they might do that, but you must not expect them to work
longer; they do not like working longer than a day or two.... A lot
of them are young fellows. If you could get hold of them when first
they come into the casual ward and get them away, something might be
done."[39]
[Footnote 39: Qs. 3281, 3347, 3358-9.]
By way of substantiating the foregoing statement, it may be recalled
that of 689 casual paupers prosecuted at the Metropolitan police courts
by the Poor Law authorities in 1907, 538 or 78 per cent. were charged
with refusing or neglecting to work.
The indulgent spirit in which the urban loafer is regarded in
this country is well illustrated by the free hand given in London
to the army of work-shirkers and unemployables, irrespective of
nationality, to take possession of the public streets for the purpose
of demonstrations in every time of acute unemployment. A large number
of the men who paraded the streets on the latest occasion of the kind
were unquestionably deserving men, who would have accepted any work
offered to them, but the vast majority were notoriously only unemployed
because they had neither desire nor intention to be otherwise. "Those
who are not loafers are worse," was the verdict of a police inspector
who had scrutinised one of the processions; "there are very few genuine
unemployed among them; most of them never did a day's work in their
lives," and another police officer, who analysed a procession at my
request, assured me that he knew every man, and not one in fifty would
ever do a day's work if he could help it. It was even worse with the
London "unemployed" processions of the early months of 1903. When these
were in full progress, the Chairman of the Wandsworth and Clapham Board
of Guardians wrote to _The Times_:--
"The superintendent of the casual wards at our workhouse has had
opportunities this week of seeing the processions of the so-called
'unemployed.' He assures me that he detected amongst the number
several hundreds who habitually came before him as vagrants, and it is
his opinion, after consultation with others holding similar positions
to his own under the Poor Law authorities, that 80 per cent. of those
who are allowed to parade the streets belong to the casual class."
At a meeting of the Strand Board of Guardians it was reported that
"hundreds of the processionists were tramps and workhouse inmates, who
had asked leave to look for work and took part in the march so that
they might spend their share of the collection in beer." From first to
last these demonstrations were organised and engineered by socialistic
agents, who called the tunes and paid the pipers generously so long
as the public provided the necessary funds. Beginning with a couple
of men and a collecting box, they expanded on the snowball principle
day by day, until they numbered hundreds of men and scores of
collecting boxes, and at last created a street scandal which was daily
anticipated with mixed curiosity, disgust, and alarm. There was never
any spontaneity about the processions; agitators fixed the rendezvous,
marshalled their hosts, conducted the tours, and paid the demonstrators
so much per head for the walk round, according to the proceeds of the
collecting boxes. So far did the farce go, that police constables were
at last told off to assist the loafers to perform their perambulations
with due convenience and order. And these bands of "demonstrators,"
composed of such elements, had the audacity to go through the solemn
farce of passing deliberately drawn-up resolutions day after day,
protesting that owing to the selfishness of the propertied classes
they were doomed to lives of "compulsory idleness," and calling on the
Government to adopt measures to remove the "state of famine in time of
peace" from which they suffered!
It was quite in keeping with the absurdity of the whole proceedings
that a strike of the processionists, caused by a deduction from the
day's pay by way of contribution towards the expenses of the show,
should have threatened the collapse of the parades long before the
philanthropy of the spectators was exhausted. And yet while this
wholesale begging was condoned by the police authorities, and carried
on with their help, isolated mendicants were all the time pursued with
the customary rigours of the law. "At the North London Police Court,"
ran a newspaper record, while the processions were at their height,
"a costermonger was sent to twenty-one days' hard labour for begging
as one of the unemployed. He admitted that he had hitherto been in
organised processions, but thought he would do better by begging alone.
A gaoler stated that he had known the prisoner for many years, and he
seldom, if ever, did any work."
Happily, although public convenience suffered, public security was not
seriously threatened during those eventful days, when, out of sheer
jealousy lest the sacred principle of the "liberty of the subject" to
do what he likes should be infringed, the authorities, day after day,
handed over the principal thoroughfares of the Metropolis to a mob,
whose will to create anarchy was probably only checked by its physical
inability. Under the same favourable circumstances, a well-fed mob
might have placed London, for a time, under a reign of terror.
What the intelligent foreign observer thinks about English town
loafers, and the indulgent way in which we humour their weaknesses, may
be judged from the following reflections of a recent German visitor to
London:--
"When the Londoners say, 'These are our unemployed,[40] they do not
see what strikes a foreigner at once--that all these dirty, ragged
figures do not give the impression of out-of-works at all--that they
look rather like people who endeavour to keep miles away from work. No
man who really wants work looks like the average London unemployed.
He has no time to lounge at street corners or patrol the principal
streets--which are certainly not places where work is to be found.
Doubtless there are thousands of genuine out-of-works in London, but
these are not the people whom the foreigner sees.
[Footnote 40: "Berliner Lokalanzeiger," July, 1909.]
"The foreigner naturally asks: How do these people live? And the
answer makes him acquainted with an English institution which is
probably unique of its kind in the whole world--which is certainly
unknown to the German: it is the 'workhouse.' The name recalls our
own house of correction, but the 'workhouse' is in fact the opposite
of that. As a rule, it is a fine building--in Lambeth we might almost
call it a palace--to which every man who is out of work has access.
There he receives supper, bed, and breakfast, after which he is able
to go in search of work again. If he finds none he may return to the
workhouse in the evening, and, as one might expect, this is what he
generally does.
"The workhouses are maintained at enormous cost, and it is
characteristic of the good heartedness of the Englishman--for the
Englishman is good hearted--that he pays this cost, out of local
taxes, without grumbling. That the institution is a wise one, however,
I doubt. The man who says to himself that he must have sixpence or he
will have nothing to eat to-morrow will go to far more trouble to get
these coppers together than the one who says: "At the worst I can go
into the workhouse.'"[41]
[Footnote 41: "Berliner Lokalanzeiger," July, 1909.]
CHAPTER III.
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]
[Footnote 42: "Liberty," Chapter IV.]
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]
[Footnote 43: I take the following from a newspaper (January 1,
1904):--"At the Grantham Borough Police Court two vagrants, were sent
to gaol for twenty-one days, with hard labour, for refusing to work
whilst inmates of the casual ward at the Grantham Workhouse. One of
the magistrates said this appeared to be the only way to deal with
the question, but the Chief Constable remarked that such men were too
comfortable in prison, and that was the reason why they liked going
there so much. The master at the workhouse said he heard two others
wish they were going with them to gaol."]
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.
[Footnote 44: The terms Detention Colony and Labour House are here,
for convenience, used synonymously, though strictly speaking, a colony
is an establishment in the country to which land for farming and for
improvement is attached, while the Labour House may be located in a
town.]
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]
[Footnote 45: Report of Vagrancy Committee, Vol. I., p. 67.]
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.
[Footnote 46: _See_ pp. 195-197.]
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.
[Footnote 47: The principal offences committed by these guests were:
Larceny, frauds, and receiving stolen property, 97; begging and
sleeping out, 18; burglary, housebreaking, etc., 25; frequenting
public places with intent to commit felony, etc., 11; sexual offences,
indecency, etc., 8; brothel-keeping, 50; prostitution, 19; living on
prostitutes' earnings, 25; and wounding, assaults, drunkenness, etc.,
18.]
[Footnote 48: The Prison Commissioners (Report for 1903, p. 119),
estimate that the annual net cost per head, after deducting the
value of work done, is £22 11s. in local and £29 in convict prisons,
exclusive of all charge for buildings.]
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.
[Footnote 49: For a description of Merxplas, _see_ pp. 104-132.]
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:--
[Footnote 50: Statute of 27 Henry VIII., c. 25.]
"(1) The giving of alms of any kind whatever to
mendicant vagrants is prohibited on pain of a fine not
exceeding 9 marks (9s.).
"(2) The giving of food and clothing for the relief
of visible want is as before subject to no penalty, provided
that there be no possibility of the recipient exchanging
such gifts for money or brandy."
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.
[Footnote 51: That this principle was not always the fetish it has
become is shown by the following extract from Dr. Burn's "History
of the Poor Law," published in 1764:--"But how shall begging be
restrained, which by a kind of prescriptive claim hath so long been
accustomed to triumph above the laws? All sorts of severities, it
appears, have been enacted against vagrants; and yet they wander still.
Nevertheless, one would hope the disease is not past all remedy. If it
is, let us cease the unequal contention, and submissively give up our
fortunes to the next that comes with a pass, and tells us a justice of
the peace hath so ordered it; but let beggars and vagrants be doing.
There is one infallible way to put an end to all this, and the easiest
in the world, which consists merely in a non-feasance. Give them
nothing. If none were to give, none would beg, and the whole mystery
and craft would be at an end in a fortnight. Let the laws continue if
you please to apprehend and punish the mendicants; but let something
also be done effectually against those who encourage them. If the
principal is punished it is not reasonable the accessory should go
free. In order to which, let all who relieve a common beggar be subject
to a penalty."]
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 1-1/2 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.
[Footnote 52: In my evidence before the Departmental Committee on
Vagrancy, I fully described the hostel and way ticket system which
has for many years been in successful operation in Germany, and the
same information was given by Mr. H. Preston Thomas regarding the more
recent Swiss system. _See also_ Chap. X. (pp. 212-228), of the present
Volume.]
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]
[Footnote 53: Mr. J. W. Thompson, in Annual Report for 1908, p. 42.]
In the following chapters the measures which have been adopted in
Continental countries for dealing with the social parasite will be
considered in detail.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BELGIAN BEGGARS' DEPOTS.
The legislation of Belgium for the treatment of vagrants and mendicants
experimented in many directions before it established forced Labour
Houses and Colonies for the detention of these offenders. As early as
1793, during the Dutch connection, a Decree (October 15) was issued,
making vagrancy and mendicancy misdemeanours punishable by detention
in a house of correction for one year, while vagrants on a second
conviction, and beggars on a third, were liable to transportation. A
law of July 5, 1808, again formally prohibited begging, and provided
for the detention of offenders in forced Labour Houses; and the Penal
Code of October 12, 1810, awarded imprisonment, followed by Labour
House detention, to loafers generally. The last-named law does not
appear to have been stringently enforced, and it was relaxed in 1848,
in consequence of which act vagrancy and begging increased. The
result was a new law of March 6, 1866, imposing heavier penalties on
able-bodied loafers of all kinds, though vagrancy was punished more
severely than simple mendicancy. By reason of this law some of the
old Labour Houses were abolished, and a large central institution
was established at Merxplas, in the Province of Flanders, for the
detention of all classes of offenders for disciplinary treatment. A
little later the penalties for vagrancy and begging were reduced, and
a more radical amendment of the law took place in 1891, the effect of
which was to take away from these offences a penal character.
Under this law, the beggar, the tramp, and the loafer are dealt with
at the present time. The great difference between the original Belgian
Labour Houses and the Beggars' Depots of to-day lies in the fact that
the earlier institutions were managed by philanthropic associations,
while those existing to-day are State establishments, and form part of
the judicial system of the country.
The law of November 27, 1891[54] (which came into force on January
4, 1892), for the repression of vagrancy and mendicity required the
Government to organise correctional institutions of three kinds,
_viz._: (_a_) Beggars' Depots (_dépôts de mendicité_); (_b_) Houses
of Refuge (_maisons de refuge_), and Reformatory Schools (_écoles de
bienfaisance_). The institutions of the first two kinds are commonly
spoken of as Labour Houses or Colonies in Belgium. There are two
Beggars' Depots, the central one for men at Merxplas, near Antwerp, and
a small one for women at Bruges; and there are three Houses of Refuge,
_viz._, Wortel and Hoogstraeten (managed as one establishment) for men,
and one at Bruges for women.
[Footnote 54: For the full text of the law see Appendix III., pp.
258-263.]
The law states that the Beggars' Depots shall be "exclusively devoted
to the confinement of persons whom the Judicial Authority shall place
at the disposal of the Government" for that purpose. Such persons are
of the following classes: (_a_) Able-bodied persons who, instead of
working for their living, depend upon charity as professional beggars;
(_b_) persons who, owing to idleness, drunkenness, or immorality,
live in a state of vagrancy; and (_c_) _souteneurs_. These persons
may be committed by the magistrates for a period not less than two
nor more than seven years. Moreover, vagrants and beggars who have
been sentenced by a Correctional Court to imprisonment for less than
a year, may be ordered to undergo detention in a Depot at the end of
the sentence for not less than one year or more than seven years, just
as offenders of the same kind are sent to Labour Houses in Germany
and Austria after undergoing imprisonment. It is provided, however,
that the Minister of Justice may, at any time, order the release
of persons confined in a Depot, should he be of opinion that their
further confinement is unnecessary. In order to give the loafer a
chance of voluntary reformation, he is on a first conviction sent to
a House of Refuge by way of probation for a period not exceeding one
year, or until he shall have earned 12s. On re-conviction, his certain
destination is the Depot of Merxplas, with its severer discipline. The
House of Refuge is provided for the reception of (_a_) persons handed
over by a Judicial Authority to the Government for simple detention,
and (_b_) persons whose restraint may be asked for by a Communal
Authority, though those of the latter class must enter of their own
free will if over eighteen years of age. In general, the House of
Refuge is intended for vagrants, mendicants, loafers, and dissolute
persons who are not thought to deserve the treatment of incorrigible
offenders. The voluntary inmates correspond very closely to the typical
unemployed person who applies for task work in our English workhouses.
In no case may detention exceed a year, unless with the detainee's
acquiescence, and as in the case of the Beggars' Depots, the Minister
of Justice may order the immediate discharge of any person whose
further confinement may appear to him unnecessary.
In the institutions of both types small daily wages are paid, except
when withdrawn as a measure of discipline, and a portion of every man's
earnings is put away as a leaving fund (_masse de sortie_), to be paid
out to him in cash, clothing and tools. In no case is a well behaving
colonist allowed to leave penniless. A minimum sum of 4s. is given
to every such man, whether he has earned it or not; those guilty of
misconduct or idleness take away their savings, however small, and no
more. The Minister of Justice approves the scale of payment for every
class of work in the two institutions.
The cost of maintenance of persons sent by a judicial authority to
the Depot or House of Refuge is borne, in equal shares, by the State,
the Provinces, and the Communes in which the persons have their
settlement, but infirm persons are maintained altogether by their
settlement communes, which likewise bear the whole cost in the case of
persons detained in a House of Refuge at their own request. Where a
person, detained by judicial decision, has no settlement, the costs of
maintenance fall on the province in which he was arrested or brought
before the Court; in the case of _souteneurs_ the cost is borne by the
Communes in which they pursued their practices. Costs of maintenance
can, however, be recovered from the persons concerned, or those legally
liable for their support.
The following were the admissions in the Beggars' Depots and the Houses
of Refuge for the first fifteen years after the Act came into force:--
ADMISSIONS TO BEGGARS' DEPOTS.
-------+--------------------------------+------------
| Number of Admissions. | Mean
| | Number
Year. +---------+-----------+----------+ of
| Male. | Female. | Total. | Inmates.
-------+---------+-----------+----------+------------
| | | |
1892 | 6,147 | 666 | 6,813 | 3,564
1893 | 3,482 | 352 | 3,834 | 4,324
1894 | 4,141 | 393 | 4,534 | 4,193
1895 | 3,722 | 333 | 4,055 | 4,529
1896 | 3,224 | 292 | 3,516 | 4,430
1897 | 3,115 | 266 | 3,381 | 4,076
1898 | 3,339 | 284 | 3,623 | 4,208
1899 | 3,018 | 215 | 3,233 | 4,248
1900 | 3,547 | 253 | 3,800 | 4,058
1901 | 4,348 | 275 | 4,623 | 4,542
1902 | 4,514 | 252 | 4,766 | 4,865
1903 | 4,649 | 386 | 5,035 | 5,054
1904 | 4,615 | 275 | 4,890 | 5,132
1905 | 4,624 | 260 | 4,884 | 5,450
1906 | 4,426 | 268 | 4,694 | 5,351
-------+---------+-----------+----------+------------
ADMISSIONS TO HOUSES OF REFUGE.
-------+--------------------------------+------------
| Number of Admissions. | Mean
| | Number
Year. +---------+-----------+----------+ of
| Male. | Female. | Total. | Inmates.
-------+---------+-----------+----------+------------
| | | |
1892 | 6,139 | 775 | 6,914 | 2,043
1893 | 4,411 | 942 | 5,353 | 2,145
1894 | 4,593 | 519 | 5,112 | 2,902
1895 | 4,559 | 414 | 4,973 | 2,766
1896 | 3,805 | 360 | 4,165 | 2,314
1897 | 3,745 | 323 | 4,068 | 1,876
1898 | 3,770 | 343 | 4,113 | 1,983
1899 | 3,398 | 258 | 3,656 | 1,823
1900 | 3,586 | 266 | 3,852 | 1,691
1901 | 4,174 | 261 | 4,435 | 1,761
1902 | 4,389 | 252 | 4,641 | 1,876
1903 | 3,428 | 278 | 3,706 | 1,733
1904 | 3,546 | 221 | 3,767 | 1,620
1905 | 3,057 | 195 | 3,252 | 1,352
1906 | 2,505 | 184 | 2,689 | 1,176
-------+---------+-----------+----------+-------------
The Labour Colony of Merxplas is unique as a centralised State
reformatory for loafers, and, owing to its large extent, the excellence
of its arrangements, and not least, the rational principles upon which
it is administered, it fully deserves the study and the praise which
have been bestowed upon it by foreign observers. On the whole, it would
seem to correspond more nearly than any other Continental institution
for forced labour to the special needs of this country.
The buildings of Merxplas are grouped together in convenient positions,
and are of a very substantial kind. The principal blocks contain the
offices, the several classes of dormitories, the workshops, the stores,
the exercise wings, the dining hall, the church, the hospital, the
prison, and the barracks, for a small guard of 150 men is stationed
on the premises for cases of emergency. Well-made roads intersect the
grounds in various directions, and there is a large amount of open
space.
The inmates of Merxplas are divided into six classes: (1) Men sentenced
for offences against morality and for arson; (2) men sentenced to
Colony life as a sequel to a term of imprisonment of less than one
year, and men whose past history shows them to be dangerous to the
community; (3) habitual vagabonds, mendicants, inebriates, and men
generally unable to support themselves; (4) men under twenty-one years
of age; (5) infirm and incurable persons; and (6) first offenders. In
December, 1907, the inmates were divided amongst these classes in the
following proportions: (1) 169; (2) 328; (3) 3,033; (4) 20; (5) 1,425;
(6) 40; total, 5,015.
The men in Classes (1) and (2) are detained in special quarters, and
under special supervision, and work apart from the rest, with whom they
have no intercourse whatever, being, in fact, treated as criminals.
The only difference between Classes (3) and (4) in regard to treatment
is that the younger men are kept separate from the older, and that a
portion of their time is devoted to school. The infirm in Class (5)
are able to do light work, while the incurables do none. Class (6)
explains itself. All the offenders, except those in Class (5), are
allowed to earn wages on the scale applying to their employment; those
in Class (6) are given canteen money of 3 centimes per day for the
purchase of small luxuries. As has been explained, the minimum sentence
of detention is two years, but owing to the exercise of the Minister's
prerogative of pardon, the average term of confinement is about sixteen
months.
The small staff of eighty warders (with the military guard to fall
back upon), under a chief director and two deputy directors, is found
sufficient to control the movements of this great army of "irregulars";
in addition, there are one doctor, two priests, five teachers, nineteen
clerks, one manufacturing manager, and six sisters of mercy. Many
reliable men are, however, chosen from the ranks of the prisoners to
assist in the superintendence of work.
The offenders dealt with during the seven years 1902 to 1908 were as
follows:--
MERXPLAS BEGGARS' DEPOT (MEN).
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| 1902. | 1903. | 1904. | 1905. | 1906. | 1907. | 1908.
|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------
Admitted | 4,514 | 4,649 | 4,615 | 4,624 | 4,426 | 4,212 | 4,431
Discharged | 2,847 | 2,922 | 2,827 | 2,666 | 2,935 | 2,792 | 2,282
Transferred | 501 | 452 | 514 | 439 | 504 | 464 | 478
Absconded | 879 | 1,004 | 1,066 | 1,243 | 1,031 | 919 | 1,055
Died | 125 | 108 | 112 | 94 | 136 | 134 | 139
|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------
Total | 4,352 | 4,486 | 4,519 | 4,442 | 4,606 | 4,309 | 3,954
|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------
Detained on | 4,851 | 5,014 | 5,110 | 5,292 | 5,112 | 5,015 | 5,492
December 31 | | | | | | |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The admissions shown above included the reinstatements (of inmates
escaped) after capture, and the admissions by transfer from other
institutions. The direct admissions, the admissions by transfer, and
the reinstatements after escape are here shown separately for the
years 1901 to 1908:--
---------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
| 1901. | 1902. | 1903. | 1904. | 1905. | 1906.
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Admitted direct | 3,280 | 3,390 | 3,460 | 3,316 | 3,186 | 3,071
discharged owing to expiration | | | | | |
of sentence and Ministerial | | | | | |
decision, conducted to the | | | | | |
frontier, and deceased | 2,463 | 2,972 | 3,030 | 2,939 | 2,760 | 3,071
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Admitted by transfer | 391 | 353 | 305 | 366 | 341 | 431
Discharged by transfer | 530 | 501 | 452 | 514 | 439 | 504
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Reinstated after escape | 677 | 771 | 884 | 933 | 1,097 | 924
Escaped | 769 | 879 | 1,004 | 1,066 | 1,243 | 1,031
---------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Those "placed at the disposition of the Government" (for commitment
to the Merxplas Depot) under the law of November 27, 1891, during the
years 1901 to 1906 belonged to the following classes:--
-----------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
| 1901. | 1902. | 1903. | 1904. | 1905. | 1906.
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Able-bodied beggars and vagrants | | | | | |
(Article 13) | 4,314 | 4,509 | 4,637 | 4,614 | 4,618 | 4,419
Able-bodied beggars and vagrants | | | | | |
for detention supplementary to | | | | | |
imprisonment (Article 14) | 14 | 5 | 12 | 1 | 6 | 7
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
| 4,348 | 4,514 | 4,649 | 4,615 | 4,624 | 4,426
Deduct reinstatements after escape | 677 | 771 | 884 | 933 | 1,097 | 924
-----------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
The following further table shows the frequency of commitment during a
series of years:--
------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Number of Times | | | | | | |
Committed. | 1902. | 1903. | 1904. | 1905. | 1906. | 1907. | 1908.
------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
For the first time | 674 | 668 | 558 | 517 | 547 | 519 | 720
For the second time | 546 | 585 | 552 | 595 | 522 | 442 | 561
For the third time | 493 | 472 | 582 | 516 | 488 | 433 | 465
For the fourth time | 446 | 470 | 455 | 406 | 420 | 406 | 425
For the fifth time or oftener | 2,355 | 2,454 | 2,468 | 2,590 | 2,449 | 2,412 | 2,260
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
Total number of | | | | | | |
admissions | 4,514 | 4,649 | 4,615 | 4,624 | 4,426 | 4,212 | 4,431
------------------------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------
The whole of the men capable of working, either much or little, are
employed according to their aptitudes and physical capacity, either in
farm and land work, in the workshops, in domestic work in and around
the establishment, or in the service of outside employers. On a given
day in 1907, 1,279 men were engaged on the farm and land, 1,970 in
industrial work for the profit of the Colony, 811 in domestic work, and
525 were lent to other institutions.
The men engaged in the fields work in gangs of between fifty and sixty,
each under a single overseer. Shelters exist for their accommodation
in wet weather, and when it is impossible to do outside work they are
employed in the workshops.
The trades and occupations are very numerous, but the principal
are brick, pipe and tile making, iron founding, button making,
wood-working, mat, boot, and shoe making, weaving, tanning, tailoring,
carpentering, and printing.
Several years ago, a Committee appointed by the Lindsey (Lincoln)
Quarter Sessions visited Merxplas and reported as follows upon what
they saw of the workshops:--[55]
[Footnote 55: Report of the Vagrancy Committee adopted by the Court of
Quarter Sessions (Lincolnshire, Parts of Lindsey) on Friday, October
23, 1903.]
"Each shop was under a trade instructor. The men appeared to be
working cheerfully and diligently. As wages were higher in the shops,
we were told that it was made a privilege to work there. All the shops
were large and airy, and the following were the principal industries
being carried on at the time of our visit.
"In the ironfoundry they were making their own patterns, doing their
own casting, turning, and finishing for everything in the way of metal
used in the establishment, from cast iron window frames to brass pumps.
"Next to this was a very large shop for making cement tiles, working
for outside firms on a recently invented system of employing hydraulic
cement and colours to furnish tiles of elaborate colouring and
patterns. This shop was on a large scale, and doing remunerative work,
and impressed us very much.
"The mat making shop was of the ordinary kind, but on a very large
scale. Every description of mat, from the sennet to the thick pile mat
worked in patterns, was made.
"The weaving shop presented an interesting industry, which could
be easily learned by the unskilled, namely that of making yarn of
cowhair, which is afterwards worked into carpets. Other men were busy
spinning the thread for the warp of the cloth used for the colonists'
clothes. A large portion of this shop was also occupied by hand-looms
in full work, where the cloth itself was being woven.
"The button shop, for making mother of pearl buttons for the outside
trade, has been newly started. This shop formed an exception, in that
all the lathes were bought from outside, none being made at Merxplas.
"In the carpenters' shop was a prison van which was made entirely by
colonist labour, with the one exception of the springs. There was an
order on hand for 1,100 window frames for a new prison. We also saw
there some excellent furniture, large numbers of chairs, travelling
trunks, and cabinet work of all kinds.
"The cobblers were busy on boots for the Army, which were hand-made
throughout. Here they were also making hospital shoes from the selvage
of cloth woven on a block; a very ingenious method of utilising waste
material.
"All the printing required for the colonies is also done in a printing
shop.
"In another small shop about twenty men were employed in making fine
chains for sham jewellery.
"The brick works were large, employing thirty-six men at brick-making,
exclusive of those employed at the furnaces, and the clay-getters. The
usual number of bricks made was about 70,000 daily, the men being paid
15 centimes (1·4_d._) per 1,000.
"On an equally large scale was the making of cement conduit pipes. The
cement is made at a factory in the neighbourhood, and the white sand
is also bought.
"After visiting the brickworks we passed through small shops of
stone-masons and sculptors to the pottery and the tannery. The last
had a large number of hides in preparation, and uses bark from the
trees of the estate, but not exclusively.
"To the north of the workshops the three-winged building is a store.
Here we saw a quantity of bar iron, one of the few materials that
Merxplas cannot itself produce.
"Here was also the clothing store. The cloth is made throughout by
the colonists, with the one exception of the 'fulling' process, which
requires special machinery. The material was of several different
kinds, including two varieties for officers' uniform, and all that
is required for the winter and summer clothing of the colonists.
Civilian clothes and tools, also made in the colony, can be purchased
by the colonists when they are liberated. In the centre were several
large rooms full of the private clothes and other belongings of the
colonists, each in their own bag, and all remarkably free from any
offensive odour.
"The farming seemed to be carried on on the same excellent principles
as the workshops. The crops of maize and hemp were remarkably tall
(the latter supplies the raw material for rope making), and the fields
generally seemed th
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