There can be no hope of advance on the right lines until this mischievous appeal to sentiment is abandoned. It has been the bane of the Vagrancy Laws for generations, and more than anything else is responsible for the present difficulties of the tramp problem in its several phases. Short of compulsion, the tramp will not work, and the hope of inducing him to take to a life of industry, by placing him in an atmosphere of art and poetry, perfumes and texts, is to go counter to all the lessons of experience, and to utterly misunderstand the instincts of the tramp nature. Else how explain the notorious fact that wherever a workhouse adopts a fairly severe labour test there the tramp cannot be persuaded to go; while, conversely, the easier the terms of admission--or, more truly, of exit--the fuller is the casual ward. I read in the newspapers, at the moment of writing, that "The new labour tests adopted by the Sleaford Guardians are answering very satisfactorily, and at the fortnightly meeting, the master reported that during the past six months there had been a decrease of 250 vagrants at the Union." The fact that this official had also to complain of "dissatisfied vagrants," and "the breaking of windows and other Union property" by these irreconcilable visitors, only confirms the truth that vagrancy and hatred of work are convertible terms. But, if so, it follows that it is only by curing this unsocial aversion to exertion that the unsocial practice of vagabondage will cease to perplex and scandalise society, and to do that, coercive measures of a very definite kind will have to be employed, let the repository of power be as it may. The treatment of the tramp must, of course, be humane--that it should be other is inconceivable in these days, when even the inmates of our prisons are assured a standard of life far beyond the reach and hope of thousands of the poor who help to maintain the prisons and the prisoners--but it must, none the less, be distinctly punitive and deterrent. It must not be desirable to be sent to a disciplinary establishment of this kind; a man must rather be willing to work voluntarily outside than to work compulsorily inside. In addition to those sentenced to detention for vagrancy, the forced Labour Houses would meet the case of several other classes of notorious delinquents. They include the following:-- (1) Husbands who desert their families, and against whom legal redress cannot be obtained. (2) Paupers of the "in-and-out" class who use the workhouse as a means of evading their parental responsibilities. (3) Able-bodied paupers whose destitution is due to idleness and unwillingness to maintain themselves. (4) Dissolute persons whose life is an alternation of more or less regular work and spells of indulgence from which the workhouse is their only hope of recovery. (5) Certain classes of confirmed inebriates.