852 REPORT— 1900. 



if such rigorous action were made uniform throughout the country ; and finally if 

 magistrates more consistently enforced the laws against begging, sleeping out, and 

 similar tramp offences. But this would only be a temporary makeshift, and the 

 true remedy is to hand these parasites over to the Penal Law. In the first place, 

 vagrancy and loafing generally should be made indictable offences. The right of 

 free migration in the case of the destitute should be restricted to the extent of 

 making it dependent on police permission to travel in search of work, after the 

 principle of the police pedlar's licence. But, further, the casual ward must be 

 abolished. This might seem a strong measure, but it is really the fulcrum on 

 which the lever of reformation must rest. If loafing is to be regarded as an 

 offence to be punished, instead of an innocent weakness to be humoured, the 

 loafer's free lodging-house must disappear. The casual ward is entirely incom- 

 patible with the laws which already exist for the repression of vagrancy. It is 

 iUegal 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 10,000 vagrants every night in the casual 

 wards — which, of course, is but a fraction of the total highway population — we 

 offer direct encouragement to known law-breakers to persist in breaking the law. 

 It would, of course, be necessary to meet the case of genuine seekers of work, and 

 we should meet it considerately and indulgently. They would be expected to 

 legitimise themselves by means of a police or properly attested private certificate, 

 asserting their bonajides and destination, and this labour passport should secure 

 the free right of lodging and food on the way. For them housing might be found 

 in proper quarters, the workhouse, or any decent house of call, or in night 

 shelters such as exist in Germany and Switzerland. But the crucial point is, 

 ■ How to deal with the vagrants and loafers who do not abandon their idle ways 

 and seek work ? After a first warning these should be detained — for a period 

 sufficiently long for disciplinary purposes — in correctional institutions; the 

 hardened cases in penitentiaries to be specially provided for in existing houses of 

 correction whose regime should be modified to their needs, and the more hopeful 

 ones in some form of labour colony which, besides receiving vagrants who hod 

 passed under magisterial jurisdiction, should also, as in Germany, Holland, and 

 Switzerland, offer a temporary home to work-seekers of all kinds. It might be 

 said that that was to admit the principle of the right to work. Even if that were 

 80, the right to work is an infinitely better and wiser and safer principle to 

 concede to the masses than the right to be idle. Early English laws really 

 proposed in a crude fashion this very treatment of habitual vagrants and idlers, 

 and Germany and Switzerland — the one a conservative and the other a democratic 

 country — are treating the problem on these lines. 



WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12. 

 The following Papers were read : — 



1. The Relation between Spinners and Piecers in the Cotton Industry, 

 By S. J. Chapman, M.A. 



"When spinning first became a separate industry for men at the beginning of this 

 century the spinners successfully enforced apprenticeship rules ; and even after the 

 'mules' and 'jennies' became longer, carrying more spindles — especially after 

 power was used for driving the carriage backwards and forwards — and when con- 

 sequently more piecers were required on some ' wheels,' the old apprenticeship 

 rules were still enforced, and a distinction was drawn between those piecers who 

 were ' learners ' and those who were not. When, however, it became the rule to 

 have on each machine piecers who were not learners, and when, moreover, im- 

 proved machinery was rendering the learning of spinning an easy task, the distinc- 



