When such persons are sent to prison on charges of begging, or petty theft, it very often happens that they are assisted on their release by a Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society.  Tools are given them, work is found for them, yet they do not thrive.  Not infrequently the job is given up on some frivolous pretext; or if it is a temporary one, little or no effort is made till it actually comes to an end to look out for another.  It is little wonder that men who live in such a fashion should occasionally be destitute; the only wonder is that they manage to pass through life at all.  Those men hang upon the skirts of labour and seek shelter under its banner, but it is only for short and irregular intervals that they march in the ranks of the actual workers.  The real working man knows such people well, and heartily despises them.

Would it be a right thing to increase the burdens of the taxpayer by opening State workshops, even if such a plan were feasible, for men of the stamp we have just been describing?  Decidedly it would not.  Yet these men form a fair proportion of the persons whom we have classed as driven to crime by economic distress.  As far, then, as the criminal population is concerned, no necessity exists for the organisation of State factories; and so far as destitution is a factor in the production of crime, it can be grappled with by other agencies.  In fact, if a graduated system of Unions, with a kind of casual ward, somewhat after the German Naturalverpflegstationen, could be worked and if Trade Societies adopted, under proper precautions, the principle of allowing debilitated members of their trade the opportunity of doing something at a somewhat reduced rate, it would be impossible for any well-intentioned man to say that he was driven to crime from sheer want.  It is worth while, on the part of the nation, to make some small sacrifice to attain an object so supremely important as this.  It is very probable that hardly any sacrifice will be needed.  In any case it would get rid of the uncomfortable feeling entertained by many that there are occasions when human beings are punished who ought to be fed.  It would completely alienate all sympathy from crime; it would then be known that criminal offenders deserved the punishment they received, and justice would be able to deal with them with a firm and even hand.

CHAPTER V.

POVERTY AND CRIME.

Having analysed the part played by destitution in the production of crime, the cognate question of the extent to which poverty is responsible for it will now be considered.  If actual destitution does not count for very much in producing criminals, it may be that poverty makes up the difference, and that the great bulk of delinquency, if not the whole of it, arises from the combined operation of these two economic factors.  We have examined one of them, let us now go on to the other.  As this examination