"Inside, away from temptation, they work well, and as long as the sentence does not exceed two or three years, seem content to remain.... Even if permanent re-establishment in society is not frequently secured, this large class of the inefficients, which would otherwise form the great recruiting ground for the criminal classes, is prevented from sinking any lower. Its members are also prevented from propagating their kind, to prey upon the next generation. They have a decent and fairly comfortable life, which is largely self-supporting, and the cost is certainly far less than that of keeping them outside by the agency of charitable doles, interspersed with costly periods of residence in workhouse or gaol. "The workman slipping out of employment is there treated as a patient requiring care, not as a criminal requiring punishment, and his downward career is arrested before his technical skill is lost. The large amount of highly-skilled labour found there, compared to the utter incapacity of the average English prisoner committed for vagrancy, indicates the measure of the difference between the tramp at the commencement of his career and the same man after any lengthy period of life on the road. This skill may not indeed be sufficient to maintain the man outside, especially in face of the drink difficulty, but it is undoubtedly sufficient, inside and in the aggregate, to make him nearly self-supporting and to give a real interest to his life. In addition to thus preserving a national asset of no inconsiderable value, the technical skill of the partly-efficient, the colony system subjects the whole vagrant class to the steadying influence of regular life and regular work for long periods of time. Even where this is insufficient to re-establish the man in independent life, the evidence of the Belgian colonies is emphatic that it is sufficient to make his life both profitable to the community and not unpleasant to himself. It also effectually safeguards his class both from drink and from the attractions of the criminal class, and it certainly largely checks its reproduction." WORTEL HOUSE OF REFUGE. The House of Refuge at Wortel may be regarded as a Detention Colony for the less obnoxious offenders of the vagrant and mendicant class, but it also receives persons who voluntarily enter owing to inability to find employment or homes. The House of Refuge thus performs the functions of the labour yard attached to many English workhouses, an institution useful, and even essential, in any well-organised system of poor relief so long as it is reserved for the proper people, and is used in order to meet purely temporary needs, instead of being converted into a device, as it often is, for evading the duty of seeking regular employment and for living permanently upon the rates.