be if State labour, on an
extensive scale, were to enter into serious competition with the
individual workman?

These schemes for the establishment of State institutions offering
work to the indigent will never solve the problem of want, and all
attempts that have hitherto been made in that direction have either
ended in failure or met with small success.

The latest of these schemes is a village settlement, which the
authorities in New Zealand started some time ago to meet the case of
the unemployed. The Government, in the first place, spent L16,000 in
making roads and other conveniences for the settlers, and afterwards
advanced L21,000 for building houses, buying implements, and so on.
According to recent advices from New Zealand, only L2000 of this
advance has been paid back, and it is the general feeling of the
colony that the project has proved a failure. These, and other
experiments of a similar character, compel us to recognise the
disagreeable fact that a certain proportion of people who are in the
habit of falling out of work are, as a class, extremely difficult to
put properly on their legs. Failure, for some reason or another,
always dogs their steps, and the more Society does for them, the less
they will be disposed to do anything for themselves.

When such persons are sent to prison on charges of begging, or petty
theft, it very often happens that they are assisted on their release
by a Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society. Tools are given them, work is
found for them, yet they do not thrive. Not infrequently the job is
given up on some frivolous pretext; or if it is a temporary one,
little or no effort is made till it actually comes to an end to look
out for another. It is little wonder that men who live in such a
fashion should occasionally be destitute; the only wonder is that they
manage to pass through life at all. Those men hang upon the skirts of
labour and seek shelter under its banner, but it is only for short and
irregular intervals that they march in the ranks of the actual
workers. The real working man knows such people well, and heartily
despises them.

Would it be a right thing to increase the burdens of the taxpayer by
opening State workshops, even if such a plan were feasible, for men of
the stamp we have just been describing? Decidedly it would not. Yet
these men form a fair proportion of the persons whom we have classed
as driven to crime by economic distress. As far, then, as the crimi