At a meeting of the Strand Board of Guardians it was reported that "hundreds of the processionists were tramps and workhouse inmates, who had asked leave to look for work and took part in the march so that they might spend their share of the collection in beer." From first to last these demonstrations were organised and engineered by socialistic agents, who called the tunes and paid the pipers generously so long as the public provided the necessary funds. Beginning with a couple of men and a collecting box, they expanded on the snowball principle day by day, until they numbered hundreds of men and scores of collecting boxes, and at last created a street scandal which was daily anticipated with mixed curiosity, disgust, and alarm. There was never any spontaneity about the processions; agitators fixed the rendezvous, marshalled their hosts, conducted the tours, and paid the demonstrators so much per head for the walk round, according to the proceeds of the collecting boxes. So far did the farce go, that police constables were at last told off to assist the loafers to perform their perambulations with due convenience and order. And these bands of "demonstrators," composed of such elements, had the audacity to go through the solemn farce of passing deliberately drawn-up resolutions day after day, protesting that owing to the selfishness of the propertied classes they were doomed to lives of "compulsory idleness," and calling on the Government to adopt measures to remove the "state of famine in time of peace" from which they suffered! It was quite in keeping with the absurdity of the whole proceedings that a strike of the processionists, caused by a deduction from the day's pay by way of contribution towards the expenses of the show, should have threatened the collapse of the parades long before the philanthropy of the spectators was exhausted. And yet while this wholesale begging was condoned by the police authorities, and carried on with their help, isolated mendicants were all the time pursued with the customary rigours of the law. "At the North London Police Court," ran a newspaper record, while the processions were at their height, "a costermonger was sent to twenty-one days' hard labour for begging as one of the unemployed. He admitted that he had hitherto been in organised processions, but thought he would do better by begging alone. A gaoler stated that he had known the prisoner for many years, and he seldom, if ever, did any work."