The number of admissions to the Metropolitan casual wards in 1907 was 196,470; the number of separate individuals was not known, but 18,009 persons were identified as having been admitted more than once during a month. The Report of the Vagrancy Committee states, indeed, that 98 per cent. of the persons admitted to the casual wards of London are loafers. A witness stated before that Committee:-- "They are not working men. If you give them a job for a day or two days perhaps they might do that, but you must not expect them to work longer; they do not like working longer than a day or two.... A lot of them are young fellows. If you could get hold of them when first they come into the casual ward and get them away, something might be done."[39] [Footnote 39: Qs. 3281, 3347, 3358-9.] By way of substantiating the foregoing statement, it may be recalled that of 689 casual paupers prosecuted at the Metropolitan police courts by the Poor Law authorities in 1907, 538 or 78 per cent. were charged with refusing or neglecting to work. The indulgent spirit in which the urban loafer is regarded in this country is well illustrated by the free hand given in London to the army of work-shirkers and unemployables, irrespective of nationality, to take possession of the public streets for the purpose of demonstrations in every time of acute unemployment. A large number of the men who paraded the streets on the latest occasion of the kind were unquestionably deserving men, who would have accepted any work offered to them, but the vast majority were notoriously only unemployed because they had neither desire nor intention to be otherwise. "Those who are not loafers are worse," was the verdict of a police inspector who had scrutinised one of the processions; "there are very few genuine unemployed among them; most of them never did a day's work in their lives," and another police officer, who analysed a procession at my request, assured me that he knew every man, and not one in fifty would ever do a day's work if he could help it. It was even worse with the London "unemployed" processions of the early months of 1903. When these were in full progress, the Chairman of the Wandsworth and Clapham Board of Guardians wrote to _The Times_:-- "The superintendent of the casual wards at our workhouse has had opportunities this week of seeing the processions of the so-called 'unemployed.' He assures me that he detected amongst the number several hundreds who habitually came before him as vagrants, and it is his opinion, after consultation with others holding similar positions to his own under the Poor Law authorities, that 80 per cent. of those who are allowed to parade the streets belong to the casual class."