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.

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