[Footnote 80: "There are no means of estimating approximately the number of tramps who might properly be committed to labour colonies, and it is even more impossible to estimate how many would actually be committed if provision were made by law for the purpose. The result of any Government Department undertaking to supply sufficient accommodation for all the vagrants committed by the magistrates would either be that the accommodation would be wholly inadequate for the requirements, or, as is perhaps more probable, that public money would be wasted in establishing and fitting up institutions in which, for at all events some years, the provision made would be altogether disproportionate to the number of inmates.... "There is another consideration to which we attach great weight, and it is that labour colonies established by the State would inevitably have to be all of the same type, and we have at present no sufficient knowledge to determine exactly what that type should be."--Report, Vol. I., pp. 75.] The County Councils alone are, in my opinion, the proper authorities to undertake this responsibility, and in entrusting it to them we should only be reverting to the practice of the sixteenth century, when the provision of places of work for vagrants was made incumbent upon Quarter Sessions in every county. Moreover, I hold still to the view, advanced in my evidence before the Committee, that there is no warrant whatever for supposing that private enterprise and philanthropy would be willing to provide the funds necessary for establishing these Colonies. Nor, in my opinion, is there any reason why they should. The disciplinary treatment of the vagrant and the loafer is a public duty, and it cannot safely be left to private effort, however well-meaning that effort might be. The Voluntary Labour Colonies of the Continent and the English Colonies of the Salvation Army type rest rightly on a private basis, for their work is avowedly philanthropic and moral, and the men for whom they exist come and go at will. Detention Colonies, on the other hand, would be an essential part of the penal system of the country, and powers of restraint such as they would exercise could not properly be placed in the hands of private individuals or associations. I reassert the contention, therefore, that the Colonies should be provided by the counties according to requirements, the right being given to several counties to combine for the purpose, with a view to avoiding any unnecessary multiplication of establishments. At the same time private Colonies would prove useful auxiliaries to the public Colonies in the way indicated in the third chapter.[81] [Footnote 81: _See_ pp. 89-91.] One type of Colony alone the Committee would require the State to provide--a Colony strictly penal in character for the reception of bad cases.