Eggenburg is the one public institution, so far as I know, where the going-barefoot experiment has been tried, on a large scale, for the express purpose of benefiting the health of the inmates. And it was tried there under conditions that were just about as unfavourable as any conditions the wit of man could have devised. For the Eggenburg children are for the most part of the poorest of the poor class, the most demoralised, the criminal or semi-criminal class; and such children almost always start life heavily handicapped physically, as well as morally. Everyone who goes to this Reformatory must have given proof, before he—or she—goes, that his natural bent is to do what is wrong; that he turns to the left rather than the right instinctively; that he takes to evil ways, in fact, just as a duckling takes to water. There were nearly 400 inmates the first time I was there; and among them, although the eldest was under sixteen, there were sixty convicted thieves, nine incendiaries, and a murderer. One boy had been forty times in the hands of the police before he went to Eggenburg; another, a tiny little fellow, was suffering from alcoholism when he arrived there. Nor was that all: very many of the children were being cruelly ill-treated, beaten, tortured, or starved, when the police took possession of them. Thus to try this experiment with such material as they were was to invite failure. And to try it in the Eggenburg district was certainly not to invite success. For the climate there is bitterly cold in winter. I have seen snow five feet deep around the Reformatory, and it lies there for months together. If folk can go barefoot there with impunity, they can assuredly go barefoot anywhere in England. To make matters worse, the very officials who were told off to try the experiment were against it: they resented being called upon to try it, so sure were they that it was foredoomed. Not one among them was inclined, therefore, to do his best to render it a success. I very much doubt, indeed, judging by what they themselves told me later, whether anyone among them had even the wish that it should be a success. When Dr. Schöffel, the Provincial Home Minister, informed them that their charges were to go barefoot, every man in the institution, every woman too, rose up indignantly and denounced his project as quite wicked. The Directress of the girls’ wing stoutly refused to have lot or parcel with any such doings. If he chose to kill the boys, that was no concern of hers, but kill her girls he should not, she told him roundly. And to make them go barefoot would be to kill them, it would be downright murder, she declared; and she had never a doubt in her mind but that it would.