Many of these lodging-houses serve simultaneously as Labour Registries, or are associated with such agencies, in which case an attempt is made to provide work for such wandering workmen as are not particular as to their destination. Should suitable employment be offered, it must be accepted on pain of forfeiting claim to further help from the Association and its shelters. Without a way-ticket no one is admitted to a Hostel. This document is handed in immediately on arrival, and is retained until the owner's departure the following day. In the meantime, it is stamped in a place provided for the purpose with the date and the name of the station, and the name of the succeeding station is added in writing by way of direction to the wanderer. The personal data which are entered on the way-ticket are certainly sufficient in number and detail to prevent abuse and fraud. Besides name, place, and date of birth, occupation, last place of work, and religious confession, they include the man's height, the colour of his eyes and hair and the shape of his face, and other notable traits can be added at the Directors discretion. In 1908 the number of Hostels affiliated to the German Hostel Association was 454. During the year 2,622,000 persons were received in the Hostels for 4,547,028 nights, an increase of 551,922 persons and 483,818 nights as compared with 1907. Of those housed, 1,871,271 paid for their accommodation, 716,273 worked in return for it (these 2,587,544 persons being workpeople in transit), and 34,456 were more or less permanent boarders. Work was found by the Hostel Labour Registries for 139,088 persons. Great as is the value of these two types of institutions in helping the unemployed to obtain work, they perform a further useful service in removing from such people the temptation to mendicancy, and in clearing off the mere loafers. For it is a significant fact that the establishment of public Relief Stations has invariably had the same effect upon the tramp which the hardening of casual ward discipline has had in England; where Relief Stations have appeared the tramp has disappeared, for the simple reason that their existence gave him no excuse for begging, while the work which they offered him was not to his mind. Herr von Massow, a prominent worker in the German Relief Station movement, writes:-- "When the system was carefully adopted in wide areas the success was great and auspicious. The itinerant population of the highways greatly decreased, and the houses of correction were empty. It must not be assumed, however, that the vagrants quite abandoned the highways; they rather migrated to districts in which there were no relief stations, and large numbers crossed over the frontier, into Holland, Austria, France, and even Italy."[67] [Footnote 67: "Der Wanderer," 1909, p. 355.]