[Footnote 37: The Poor Law Act of 1899, amending an Act of 1889, provides that a child maintained by a Board of Guardians may be taken into the guardians' control until it reaches the age of eighteen years, the guardians acquiring all rights over it meanwhile, if the child has been deserted by its parent, if the guardians think that the parent, by reason of mental deficiency or vicious habits or mode of life, is unfit to have control of the child, if the parent is unable to perform his or her parental duties by reason of being under sentence of penal servitude or of being detained under the Inebriates Act, 1898, or the parent has been sentenced to imprisonment in respect of any offence against any of his or her children, or the parent is permanently bed-ridden or disabled and is an inmate of the workhouse and consents to the guardians so acting, and if both the parents (or in the case of an illegitimate child the mother of the child), are dead.] Prosecution for maintenance, if the offender can be found, and a short imprisonment if he refuses to pay, are the corrective measures already available against the parents who culpably transfer their parental liabilities to the public, and over 3,000 convictions are registered yearly by the courts for neglect to maintain family.[38] It is notorious, however, that proceedings of this kind are taken by Poor Law authorities reluctantly, since the magistrates in many districts habitually stretch the law in favour of defaulting parents. What we should do, and shall have to do, in such a case, is to take the loafer, too, and after disciplining the idleness out of his nature, give him back his family obligations, and see that he discharges them. [Footnote 38: The figures for six years are as follows:--1902, 2,832; 1903, 3,187; 1904, 3,235; 1905, 3,266; 1906, 3,095; 1907, 3,041.] Furthermore, in all large towns a considerable proportion of the frequenters of the casual wards are not even _bona-fide_ vagrants, but simply idlers of the locality, who, so long as these refuges exist, feel no disposition to work and establish homes for themselves. Of the men admitted to the casual wards of the Manchester and Chorlton Unions in a certain year, no fewer than 4,000 were found on analysis to belong to the neighbourhood. The experience of Birmingham is to the same effect. Of the London casual it has been said:-- "He is in most cases a loafer who simply migrates from one ward to another. He is in Whitechapel to-night, and in St. George's-in-the-East to-morrow night, and he will go across to Kensington the next night, but he does not leave London.... They have their times for excursions, when they go either to the seaside or hop-picking or fruit-picking, but for the greater part of the year they are in London, and they circulate round about the casual wards."