Transactions op section f. 851 



(1) Sanitary conditions have improved relatively. 



(2) Wages have risen relatively. 



(3) The number of women employed have increased relatively. 



(4) Organisation amongst the workers is more general. 



This study encourages the further extension of legal regulation. In discussing 

 the details of fresh legislation the following points are to be considered : — 



(1) Classes of workers at present unregulated, or very partially regulated, 



e.g., home-workers, shop-assistants, laundry workers, clerks, &c.' 



(2) Matters for legislation — e.g., hours of work, sanitation, dangerous pro- 



cesses, wages. 



(3) Administration, central v. local authorities, women inspectors. 



(4) Codification of present law, accompanied by differentiation to meet 



special requirements of special trades. 



6. The Treatment of the Tramp and the Loafer. 

 By William Haebutt Dawson. 



No time can be more fitting than the present for filling up an important gap 

 m our penal system and for introducing a reform which became a logical and social 

 necessity when the Poor Law was placed on its existing basis. The time hat 

 come for transferring the habitual vagrant and the loafer generally from the 

 province of the Poor Law to that of the Penal Law. To the former they do not 

 in any sense belong. The failure of centuries of reformers and legislatures to 

 make the slightest impression upon the tramp population is largely due to the 

 persistent mistake of treating his case as coming under the law of public charity. 

 What society is bound to do, as far as possible, is to exterminate 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 it, but he 

 consumes the produce of other people's labour and renders it nugatory, abstracting 

 from the wealth of society without adding to it. His example scandalises honest 

 workers ; he is a standing menace to public peace 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 the most insidious and most vicious kind. Think 

 what we do for the professional idlers ! Take the urban loafer. While honest 

 inen 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 loafer we make it 

 possible for him to travel through England from the Tweed to the Channel with- 

 out doing one hour's serious work, save for the labour tests which are imposed by 

 some — and only some — of the workhouses at which he may call. Who should 

 wonder that our past indulgent treatment of the vagrant has had the effect of 

 perpetuating and multiplying this class of social parasite ? The dictum of wise 

 Sir Matthew Hale is still irrefutably true : ' A man that has been bred up in the 

 trade of begging will never, unless compelled, fall to industry.' But that is not 

 the whole of the truth. Every one of these men creates imitators. On the 

 highways he is a walking advertisement of the advantages of idleness, while in 

 the model lodging-house, or wherever else the workhouse-shunning tramp seeks 

 nightly shelter, he acts the part of recruiting sergeant for the great army of sloth 

 and vice. What we should do, and shall have to do sooner or later, is 

 to collect the tramps from the four winds of heaven and try to discipline the 

 idleness out of their natures. For it is not, in the main at any rate, a dangerous 

 criminal class with which we have here to do, but for the most part the weak and 

 aimless characters whose great need is the moral tonic of discipline and compul- 

 sion. No faith should be placed in any cobbling of the existing Poor Law. No 

 doubt a good deal more could be done to discourage vagrancy if the separate cell 

 system were made universal, and if taskwork were rationally imposed ; in a word, 

 it the regime of the casual ward were made sufficiently rigorous to be deterrent, and 



' See Factory Inspector's Bejport, 1899, p. 254. 



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