In our criminal as well as our civil law and procedure there is equal injustice. When the poor man is accused of the slightest offence and brought before a magistrate by the police, he is, even though perfectly honest and respectable, treated from the very first as if he were guilty, often refused communication with his friends; and, when the accusation is serious, he is remanded to prison again and again till evidence has been hunted up, or even manufactured, against him. Experience shows that the latter is often done and a quite innocent man not infrequently punished. The dictum of the law, that an Englishman should be held to be innocent till he is proved to be guilty, is absolutely reversed, and he is treated as if he were guilty till, against overwhelming odds, he is able to prove himself innocent. There is no possible excuse for this now, and at the very least every man who has a home or a permanent employment should be at once discharged on his own recognizances. Equally unjust and barbarous is the system of money-fines, often for merely nominal offences, with the alternative of imprisonment. To the well-off, or to the habitual criminal, the fine is a trifle; but to the poor man charged with being drunk, with begging, or with sleeping under a haystack, or any such act which is no real offence, the common punishment of 10s. or a week's imprisonment, leaving perhaps wife and children to starve or be sent to the workhouse, is really far more immoral than the alleged offence. Again, our Poor Law itself, as usually administered, is utterly immoral. This is what a competent authority—Mr. Sidney Webb—says of it: "Underneath the feet of the whole wage-earning class is the abyss of the Poor Law. I see before me a respectable family applying for relief. What do we do to them? We, the Government of England, break up the family. We strip each individual of what makes life worth living. When the man enters the workhouse he is stripped of his citizenship—branded as too infamous to vote for a member of Parliament. Once in the workhouse, we put him to toil or to loiter under conditions that are so demoralising that we turn him into a wastrel. And we strip the wife of her children. We send her to the wash-tub or the sewing-room, where she associates with prostitutes and imbeciles. The little children, if they are under five, are taken to the workhouse nursery, where they also are tended by prostitutes and imbeciles. There they remain, day after day, without ever going down the workhouse steps until they are old enough to go to the Poor Law school, or until they are taken down in their coffins, owing to the terrible mortality among the workhouse babies."