"Nothing wearies one more than walking about hunting for employment which is not to be had. It is far harder than real work. The uncertainty, the despair, when you reach a place only to discover that your journey is fruitless, are frightful. I've known a man say, 'Which way shall I go to-day?' Having no earthly idea which way to take, he tosses up a button. If the button comes down on one side he treks east; if on the other, he treks west. "You can imagine the feeling when, after walking your boots off, a man says to you, as he jingles sovereigns in his pocket, 'Why don't you work?' That is what happened to me as I scoured the country between London and Liverpool, asking all the way for any kind of work to help me along." I remember Crooks recalling his experience at a dinner-party given by the Hon. Maud Stanley at her Westminster house. Crooks was then a fellow-member with Miss Stanley of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, and she invited us on that occasion to meet her friend Professor Wyckoff, the American author, who wrote "The Workers." In "The Workers" the author tells the story of how for a time he turned his back upon his usual well-to-do haunts in order to find out what earning one's own living by tramping from place to place doing manual work was actually like. Crooks, who, perhaps unconsciously to himself, had become the chief entertainer at table, showed Mr. Wyckoff in a moment that, realistic though his experiences had been, he could not possibly enter into the feelings of the real out-of-work who had nothing but sixpence between him and starvation. However hard up Mr. Wyckoff might have been at times, he always had the consolation that if the worst came to the worst, funds awaited him at home. The ordinary workman tramping the country, said Crooks, had no such feeling of a sure foundation somewhere, and it was only when you felt--as he had often felt when tramping for work--the utter hopelessness and loneliness of things, made doubly worse by the knowledge that wife and children were suffering too, that you could enter fully into the feelings of an out-of-work. Evidently Mr. Wyckoff had not thought of this view before, but it seemed to me to mark the all-important difference between the amateur and the real sufferer. There are some things no man can play at, and the game Mr. Wyckoff, with the best intentions in the world, and with a good deal of self-imposed suffering, tried to play was one of them. There are some experiences of life which no one can ever have for the seeking only. They come; they can never be commanded. CHAPTER VII ONE OF LONDON'S UNEMPLOYED A Casual Labourer at the Docks--A Typical Day's Tramping for Work in London--Demoralising Effects of being Out of a Job--Emptying the Cupboard for a Starving Family--Work found at last--Doing the "Railway Tavern" a Bad Turn.