Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
With us there is no compulsion. If any girl wishes to remain, she
remains. If she wishes to go, she goes. No one is detained a day or
an hour longer than they choose to stay. Yet our experience shows
that, as a rule, they do not run away. Much more restless and
thoughtless and given to change, as a class, than men, the girls do
not, in any considerable numbers, desert. The average of our London
Homes, for the last three years, gives only 14 per cent. as leaving on
their own account, while for the year 1889 only 5 per cent. And the
entire number, who have either left or been dismissed during that year,
amounts only to 13 per cent. on the whole.
IV.--They would not work.
Of course, to such as had for years been leading idle lives, anything
like work and exhaustive labour would be very trying and wearisome,
and a little patience and coaxing might be required to get them into
the way of it. Perhaps some would be hopelessly beyond salvation in
this respect, and, until the time comes, if it ever does arrive,
when the Government will make it a crime for an abled-bodied man to beg
when there is an opportunity for him to engage in remunerative work,
this class will wander abroad preying upon a generous public. It will,
however, only need to be known that any man can obtain work if he wants
it, for those who have by their liberality maintained men and women in
idleness to cease doing so. And when it comes to this pass, that a man
cannot eat without working, of the two evils he will choose the latter,
preferring labour, however unpleasant it may be to his tastes, to
actual starvation.
It must be borne in mind that the penalty of certain expulsion, which
all would be given to understand would be strictly enforced would have
a good influence in inducing the idlest to give work a fair trial,
and once at it should not despair of conquering the aversion
altogether, and eventually being able to transform and pass these once
lazy loafers as real industrious members of Society.
Again, any who have fears on this point may be encouraged by
contrasting the varied and ever-changing methods of labour we should
pursue, with the monotonous and uninteresting grind of many of the
ordinary employments of the poor, and the circumstances by which they
are surrounded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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