“A family named W----. The husband drunken, and has been in an asylum; the wife unable to live with him. He would take his boys out in the early morning, leave them somewhere, meet them again at night, and bring them back to the workhouse; they had had nothing to eat, and had wandered about in the cold all day.” “This state of things is cruel and disastrous in every respect,” writes the Committee in 1896, appointed, be it remembered, by the Department to elicit facts and “to advise as to any changes that may be desirable”. Yet we find that in 1909 the same conditions exist. To quote the Report:-- “Out of twenty special cases of which details have been obtained, twelve families have been in and out ten or more times; one child had been admitted thirty-nine times in eleven years; another twenty-three times in six years. The Wandsworth Union has a large number of dissolute persons in the workhouse with children in the intermediate schools. The parents never go out without taking the children, and seem to hold the threat of doing so as a rod over the heads of the Guardians. One mother frequently had her child brought out of his bed to go out into the cold winter night. One boy who had been admitted twenty-five times in ten years had been sent more than once to Banstead Schools, but had never stayed there long. Whenever he knew he was to go there he used to write to his mother in the workhouse, when she would apply for her discharge and go out with him.” In the thirteen years which have passed since the issue of the two Reports, what has the Local Government Board done? It has induced some of the Boards to establish receiving or intermediary houses at the cost, in the Metropolis, of about £200,000, but that is but attacking the symptom and leaving the disease untouched. Without an ideal for child-life or appreciation of child-nature, it has been content to let this hideous state of things go on. Again to quote the Report:-- “It has done nothing to prevent the children from being dragged in and out of the workhouse as it suits their parents’ whim or convenience. The man or woman may take the children to a succession of casual wards or the lowest common lodging-houses. They may go out with the intention of using the children, half-clad and blue with cold, as a means of begging from the soft-hearted, or they may go out simply to enjoy a day’s liberty, and find the children only encumbrances, to be neglected and half-starved.... The unfortunate boys and girls who are dragged backwards and forwards by parents of the ‘in-and-out’ class practically escape supervision. They pass the whole period of school age alternately being cleansed and ‘fed up’ in this or that Poor Law institution, or starving on scraps and blows amid filth and vice in their periodical excursions in the outer world, exactly as it suits the caprice or convenience of their reckless and irresponsible parents.”