hree, five or seven days? How can
it profit either the State or the woman? It only serves to familiarise
her with prison.

I could laugh at it, were it not so serious. Just look at this
absurdity! A woman gets drunk on Thursday, she is charged on Friday.
"Five shillings, or three days!" On Friday afternoon she enters prison,
for the clerk has made out a "commitment," and the gaoler has handed
her into the prison van. Her "commitment" is handed to the prison
authorities; it is tabulated, so is she; but at nine o'clock next
morning she is discharged from prison, for the law reckons every part of
a day to be a complete day; and the law also says that there must be no
discharge from prison on a Sunday, and to keep her till Monday would be
illegal, for it would be "four days." How small, how disastrous, and how
expensive it is!

If offenders, young or old, must be punished, let them be punished
decently. If they ought to be sent to prison, to prison send them.
But if their petty offences can be expunged by the payment of a few
shillings, why not give them a little time to pay those fines? Such
a course would stop for ever the miserable, deadly round of short
expensive imprisonments. I have approached succeeding Home Secretaries
upon this matter till I am tired; succeeding Home Secretaries have sent
memorandums and recommendations to courts of summary jurisdiction till,
I expect, they are tired, for generally they have had no effect in
mitigating the evil.

Magistrates have the power to grant time for the payment of fines, but
it is optional, not imperative. It is high time for a change, and surely
it will come, for the absurdity cannot continue.

Surely every English man and woman who possesses a settled home ought
to have, and must have, the legal right of a few days' grace in which to
pay his or her fine. And every youthful offender ought to have the same
right, also, even if he paid by instalments.

But at present it is so much easier, and therefore so much better, to
thrust the underworld, youthful and adult, into prison and have done
with them, than it is to pursue a sane but a little bit troublesome
method that would keep thousands of the poor from ever entering prison.

CHAPTER XIII. UNEMPLOYED AND UNEMPLOYABLE

My life has been one of activity; from an early age I have known what it
was to be constantly at work. To have the certainty of regular work, and
to have the discipline of constant duty, seem to me