As a result of the more serious attention given to the vagrancy question at that time, the President of the Local Government Board in 1904 appointed a Departmental Committee of Inquiry, before which I was invited to give evidence. The reader who takes up this book is strongly urged to study the Report of the Departmental Committee as well; it is a most able exposition of the vagrancy problem by serious investigators who were less concerned to emphasise their individual predilections than to help on the settlement of the question by uniting on broad principles of procedure. As the thorough-going recommendations of the Committee differ but slightly from the proposals which I advocated before them and here repeat, the value of the present volume will consist chiefly in the description which it contains of a series of disciplinary institutions in which other countries are actually carrying out the methods whose feasibility we are still discussing. Pressure is happily come from other directions, and particularly from the new school of Poor Law reformers. The publication of the Reports of the Poor Law Commission begins a new era in the history of public relief. The realisation of a constructive policy so large and fundamental as that which the Commissioners have put forward will probably prove to be the work of many years; yet whether our advance on the lines suggested be fast or slow, it must be obvious to everyone that the question of Poor Law reform is now a living one, and cannot again fall into the background. As regards the aspect of Poor Law administration with which this volume is concerned, all those who have laboured as path-makers in this undeveloped province of social experiment must derive satisfaction from the fact that the Commission, simply endorsing the recommendations of the Vagrancy Committee, regard the disciplinary treatment of loafers of all kinds as an essential part of any reorganisation of the Poor Law. For if the deserving poor, the genuine unemployed, and the hopeless unemployables are to be treated more systematically and more humanely in the future than they have been in the past, it will be impossible to withhold from the loafers the special attention which they need.