"It is expedient to create establishments like Merxplas in districts but little populated and situated at some distance from towns. It is also indispensable that a colony of this kind should be near a small railway station or a canal, in a healthy country, should be well provided with drinking water, and should be in a locality in which the inmates would be able to make the bricks needed for buildings." While, however, farm and land labour would form an essential source of employment and of gain in the Detention Colonies, the broad basis would need to be industrial. This is proved by the experience of all the forced Labour Colonies of the Continent of which I have knowledge, with the one exception of the Rummelsburg Labour House, near Berlin, and in this exceptional case the labour of the inmates is largely used in working the extensive sewage farms of the Berlin municipality. For obvious reasons, it would be necessary to choose such trades as could be carried on economically. In the first place, comparatively few men of the type suited to a Vagrant Colony are fit for ordinary farm work, which needs far more skill and intelligence than most urban advocates of Labour Colony schemes seem to imagine. After allowing for the relatively small number of inmates whose labour would be needed on the farm all the year round, the remainder, the great majority, would have to be employed on works of improvement, and in the workshops. The former work would necessarily be of an intermittent character, and even so would, in time, be reduced to very limited proportions. Unless outdoor employment altogether outside the establishment, such as road-making, draining, levelling, gardening, and forestry, were to be resorted to, as in some of the German forced Labour Colonies, it would be necessary to fall back on industrial work. Probably it would also be found that training in such work would offer most men the best chance of reinstating themselves in society when they obtained their release, and from the financial standpoint it would undoubtedly yield the best results for the Colony.