The Vagrancy Problem

The Case for Measures of Restraint for Tramps, Loafers, and Unemployables

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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.

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