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

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"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."

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CONTENTS

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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