For men we need at the back a graded system of colonies, such as is described in Mr. Percy Alden's recent pamphlet on "Labour Colonies" (price 1_d_., 1, Woburn Square, London, W.C.).
But the author is convinced that while such national reservoirs are essential as a background, the real problems of poverty must be worked out in connection with the _municipality_. Charity cannot cope with accumulated national evil, neither can the State redress it. The State can "way-bill" the migrating workman, can sift the mass of vagrancy and apply "compulsion to work," can link labour bureaux, can reform the Poor Law. But we possess, at present hardly tapped, a vast fund of local patriotism. _It is to reconstructed civic life we must look for the solution of civic problems_, the abolition of the slum, the education of the child, the provision of "unemployed" capital to place "unemployed" labour on "unemployed" land, and thereby convert "a trinity of waste into a unity of production." A great step has been taken by the Unemployed Act, however imperfect. The whole subject of unemployment the author has dealt with in a book entitled "How to Deal with the Unemployed" (Brown, Langham & Co.), and she regards the chapter on "The Labour Market" as the key to the solution of the problem.
We shall have to recognise the maintenance of the home by the recognition of the _droit au travail_--"the right to work"--in some form or another. The streams of labour, which, if let loose in misery and idleness, are destructive, can, if rightly husbanded, fertilise the soil.
Grave as are the problems to be solved, menacing as is the danger if reforms are neglected or delayed, I believe the Spirit of God which created in the mind of our forefathers the ideal of the "_Commonwealth_" will guide our national policy into right channels,
"True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."
[152] It must be remembered that the largest cities attract such, and form, as it were, cesspools of degeneration. The honest traveller may be in some lodging-houses in larger proportion, but he has to herd with the worst, or sleep out. See pp. 35-37.
[155] See Minutes of Evidence before Vagrancy Committee, 10,482-10,492.
[157] Rowton Houses, however, accommodate large numbers of working men