Moreover, the married urban loafer, like the married vagrant, inflicts incalculable injury upon others. While it has been made a misdemeanour to drag children round the country, the pauper of the "in-and-out" type can still with impunity commit a crime no less outrageous upon the offspring for whose decent maintenance he is legally and morally responsible. For the children of such intermittent paupers are introduced to workhouse life and breathe the atmosphere of pauperisation from their earliest consciousness. When the father enters the house, the children go with him, and for them, as for him, life is an alternation of abject dependence and equally abject liberty. "Through these children," says the Report of the Poor Law Commission truly, "the evil (of pauperisation) is being perpetuated to another generation, for they get no chance of education, while they become habituated to constant appeals to the Poor Law, and lack the advantages of either home or school life."[36] [Footnote 36: Report, Vol. II., p. 279.] As a Poor Law Guardian, I had to do, on one occasion, with an able-bodied pauper of this kind, who, on the ground of destitution, obtained admittance to the workhouse with his large family. Once in, he was so satisfied with his new surroundings and freedom from responsibility, that for many months it proved impossible to dislodge him. Under the master's eye he was willing to do the work required of him, but he had no wish to find employment outside, and did not leave the house until he was literally ejected. It is true that the Poor Law Act of 1899 gives power to Boards of Guardians to appropriate neglected children, and so preserve them from the ill effects of their vicious training.[37] That is undoubtedly kind to the child, and in the end it is bound to be advantageous to the public. But here comes in an absurd anomaly: Whatever the theory of the law may be, we practically leave it to the option of the parents to evade responsibility or not as they will. All they have to do is to make themselves scarce, and the Poor Law officials and the police may find them or they may not. I know of one Union in whose workhouse there are, at the moment of writing, six children of one father, and he an able-bodied man, who has fled from the district once, and only refrains from doing so again because he knows that he is under strict police supervision. Rousseau deposited his offspring on the steps of the Foundling Hospital at dead of night, and went away, thinking noble thoughts, for this was a part of the harmonious "Social Contract," and everybody else could do the same. The English loafer yields his children to workhouse care with but the gentlest pretence of unwillingness, and betakes himself to liberty, lightened of a disagreeable burden, and reflecting that of all strange devices for relieving him and his kind of parental responsibility and of encouraging the multiplication of paupers, the Poor Law is the strangest.