Sir Robert Anderson, for many years Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, has long held the view that the professional criminal is not a necessity of civilization, and that a reform of the method of dealing with him would soon bring about his complete extinction. Sir Robert, with his extensive Scotland Yard experience behind him, declares that the number of high-class criminals in England does not exceed a few dozen, and that if these were got out of the way organized crime against property would cease. The plan which Sir Robert Anderson has conceived is that of providing asylums in place of the present prisons, where a man who has proved to have devoted his life to crime would be sent for life and made to earn his living. We must provide asylums for the Unemployables also, in order to preserve ourselves. It is no use being sentimental. We must relegate social parasites to a state and condition where they can no longer infest the social body and cannot increase in numbers. When we have done this, when you working men have done this, in less than a generation the question of the Unemployed will be satisfactorily settled. It may well be, moreover, that such a method will change the least degraded Unemployables into honest, hard-working citizens who can be once more admitted into the world on probation. These are my opinions, and though I have given you but a sketch of them to-night, I submit that they are at least reasonable and worth consideration. The words of the poet Shelley are no less applicable in the present than they were in the past. He had an unconquerable faith in the spiritual destiny of our race, and his lines, when he wrote his “song to the men of England” were filled with flame:-- “The seed ye sow another reaps; The wealth ye find another keeps; The robes ye weave another wears; The arms ye forge another bears. Sow seed--but let no tyrant reap; Find wealth--let no impostor heap; Weave robes--let not the idle wear; Forge arms, in your defence to bear.” AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG VII AN AUTHOR’S POST-BAG “_You have the letters Cadmus gave_”----