The Casual Wards, moreover, furnish a considerable contingent each year to the Prison population in the shape of persons who misbehave as paupers, _i.e._, refuse to perform the allotted task, or destroy workhouse clothes. There was at the beginning of the century a remarkable increase in the number of persons committed for offences against Workhouse regulations. For twenty years previously the numbers had oscillated between two thousand and four thousand: in 1901 they increased to over five thousand. The cry that the pauper prefers Prison to Workhouse was again raised with the object of showing that the conditions of Prison life were unduly attractive. This agitation, combined with the fact that the number of persons convicted of "Begging" and "Sleeping-Out" had risen, in the four years from 1900 to 1903, from 12,631 to 20,729 led to some uneasiness in the public mind, and a special Inquiry was ordered by the President of the Local Government Board as to the law applicable to persons of the Vagrant class, and as to the administration of that law. Previously to this, the Prison Commissioners had reported to the Secretary of State--"that they are not prepared to admit that the increase of the vagrant class sent to prison is due to the fact that the conditions of prison life are unduly attractive. Casual paupers as soon as they become prisoners are subject to ordinary prison rules, not specially devised for dealing with this class, but to meet the _average human needs of thousands of prisoners of different classes, characters, professions, and physique_; and being, as a rule, under very short sentences, they receive the dietary and employment which practice and experience has designed as being, on the whole, the best and the most salutary for the early stages of a sentence of imprisonment. This dietary is not, like that of a casual ward, for one night or two nights, but part of a systematically graduated dietary table, intended to embrace both short and long sentences. The dietary and task are uniform throughout the country, varying only on medical certificate, all prisoners on reception being subject to a careful medical examination, and if they deviate from the normal standard of health and fitness, a full task of labour is not imposed; and the medical officer also has power to make additions to the dietary. In workhouses, however, our inquiries show that there is no uniform scale of diet or of task, and, so far as we are aware, these are not regulated by medical certificate as is done in prison. Hence, two results follow: Firstly, vagrants to whom the prison dietary and task and medical practice are well known, from a probable acquaintance with many prisons, openly profess a preference for the prison in those localities where the workhouse conditions are more severe; and, secondly, it may happen that on reception in prison the medical officer will not certify the prisoner as fit for the labour, the refusal to perform which, at a