_The workhouse_, we are told, creates the loafer. “The moment this class of man”--i.e., the easy-going, healthy fellow who feels no call to work--“becomes an inmate so surely does he deteriorate into a worse character still”; and we read also that “the features in the present workhouse system make it not only repellent (as is perhaps necessary), but also, as is unnecessary, degrading. Of all the spectacles of human demoralization now existing in these islands, there can scarcely be anything worse than the scene presented by the men’s day ward of a large urban workhouse during the long hours of leisure on week-days or the whole of Sundays. Through the clouds of tobacco-smoke that fill the long low room, the visitor gradually becomes aware of the presence of one or two hundred wholly unoccupied males, of every age between fifteen and ninety--strong and vicious men, men in all stages of recovery from debauch, weedy youths of weak intellect, old men dirty and disreputable ... worthy old men, men subject to fits, occasional monstrosities or dwarfs, the feeble-minded of every kind, the respectable labourer prematurely invalided, the hardened, sodden loafer, and the temporarily unemployed man who has found no better refuge. In such places there are congregated this winter certainly more than 10,000 healthy, able-bodied men.” _The labour yard_, we learn, tends to become the habitual resort of the incapables, and “a stay there will demoralize even the best workmen”. “In short,” says the Minority Report, “whether as regards those whom it includes or those whom it excludes for relief, the labour yard is a hopeless failure, and positively encourages the worst kind of under-employment.” The expense of this failure is so great that in one yard the stone broken cost the Guardians £7 a ton. _Casual wards_ have long been known as the nurseries of a certain class of vagrant--men and women who become familiar with their methods and settle down to their use. They fail as resting-places for honest seekers after work as they travel from town to town, and they fail also--even when made harsher than prisons--to stimulate energy. Poor Law reformers, like Mr. Vallance, have through many years called for their abolition.