How must we face such grave national issues? _The home must be made the centre of all our thought, the focus of national consciousness._ We must educate each boy and girl to be primarily father and mother; we must worship at the cradle of the child. The _community_ must assume fatherhood and motherhood, and enforce a right conception of their duties on its subsidiary units. To counteract the restlessness of modern life we must make of our Fatherland a Home, where every man, woman and child will be rightly cared for, disciplined if need be, but embraced in the wide brotherhood of Humanity.
We cannot turn back the hour-glass of time and stay the new-born activity, but we can utilise the new energy of Humanity as we have learned to utilise steam and electricity. The units divorced from true use in our social system may, nay must, become a desolating flood, unless we dig channels and build reservoirs, and so direct the living stream back to the formation of true homes, utilising the resources of the smiling acres of our native land, spreading out our cities, and afforesting our barren moors.
The Fluidity of Labour is a fact that has come to stay. Modern subdivided employment depends on _the ready supply at particular places of necessary workmen_. If a man is destitute through remaining too long where work is not to be had, he must travel, and we need to _facilitate_, not to hinder, his rapid transit to the right place, and to furnish him with all information as to whither he should go. We need to provide him, in fair return for a moderate task of work, with bed and board on the journey. _Except in exchange for work we should give neither State aid nor charity to the traveller_, since, if he cannot work enough to find bed and board, he belongs to the _incapable_, for whom a special provision is required, or the "_won't work_" for whom compulsion is best. The universal provision of a proper remedy for migrating destitution would soon avail to sort men into the three classes of _refractory_, _incapable_, or simply "_unemployed_." The Relief station method of Germany is the key to the situation.
But the Relief station alone will not cope with the evil _unless the common lodging-house is reformed from top to bottom_. It is necessary to recognise the existence not only of _destitute_ homelessness, but of _migratory_ homelessness. It is necessary to get into safe and sanitary surroundings the whole of the outcasts who sleep out, and to purify our parks and streets. One thousand four hundred and sixty-three men walking London streets in one night constitute a social danger. In addition to this we have on the same night 21,058 single men under the undesirable conditions of the common lodging-house. London common lodging-houses are only required to find 240 cubic feet of air for each lodger, as against 300 cubic feet in the provinces, and 350 cubic feet in an ordinary dwelling house. Alderman Thompson says (p. 22): "Anything less than 350 cubic feet per head ought to result in a conviction before the most reactionary justices." Add the number crowded into London slums, what an army of homelessness!