To aid in this discrimination, it was suggested that a police constable, who had knowledge of habitual vagrants and was feared by them, would be useful as an assistant relieving officer.[303] Nevertheless the other policy, that of the casual ward, admitting to its disagreeable and deterrent shelter every applicant who chose to apply for it, was not abandoned by the Central Authority. The orders and instructions about casual wards still remained in force, and continued to be issued or confirmed. These involved, not the refusal of relief to the able-bodied healthy male adult, but systematic provision for it, coupled with detention and a task of work.
Ten years later we find the Central Authority definitely abandoning, so far as the Metropolis was concerned, both its policy of discrimination among wayfarers and that of refusing, at any rate in weather not inclement, relief to the healthy able-bodied male vagrant. The London workhouses had become congested "by the flocking into them of the lowest and most difficult to manage classes of poor." [304]
They were now to be entirely relieved of the annoyance and disorganisation caused by the nightly influx of casual inmates. All persons applying for a night's lodging were to be subjected, whatever their antecedents, character, or circumstances, to a uniform "test of destitution," by being received only in "asylums for the houseless poor," six of which, conducted on a uniform system of employment, discipline, and deterrent treatment, were to be established in London apart from the workhouses. [305] This was admittedly a revival of the project of 1844,[306] which had failed from the "want of co-operation on the part of several of the boards of guardians." [307] The revived policy proved for six years equally unsuccessful and for the same reason. The six "asylums for the houseless poor" did not get built, and vagrants continued to be dealt with haphazard in the forty Metropolitan workhouses. In 1864 the Central Authority took what proved to be a decisive step. The Metropolitan Houseless Poor Acts, 1864 and 1865, made it obligatory on Metropolitan boards of guardians to provide casual wards for "destitute wayfarers, wanderers, and foundlings."[308] At the same time it bribed them to adopt that policy for all wayfarers by making (in accordance with a recommendation of the House of Commons Select Committee on Poor Relief of 1864) the cost of relief given in the casual wards a common charge upon the whole of London.[309] The casual wards so made a common charge had to be conducted under rules to be framed by the Central Authority; and these we have in the Circular of October 26th 1864, recommending that the new casual wards should consist of two large "parallelograms," each to accommodate in common promiscuity as many of one sex as were ever expected; furnished with a common "sleeping platform" down each side, on which the reclining occupants were to be separated from each other only by planks on edge; without separate accommodation for dressing or undressing; and with coarse "straw or cocoa fibre in a loose tick," and a rug "sufficient for warmth."[310] To this was added, by the General Order of March 3rd 1866, a uniform dietary "for wayfarers" in these wards of bread and gruel only,[311] thus definitely marking the abandonment, so far as London was concerned, of all attempt, either at refusing a night's lodging to able-bodied healthy males, or at doing anything more or anything different for the honest unemployed wayfarer than for the professional tramp.
Notwithstanding the apparent decisiveness of policy as to vagrants embodied in the Metropolitan Houseless Poor Act of 1864, we find the Central Authority, disturbed by the steady growth of vagrancy throughout the country,[312] still continuing to talk about discrimination. In 1868, Sir M. Hicks-Beach, in announcing that the Poor Law Board contemplated extending to the whole country the Metropolitan system of dealing with vagrants, added, with an inconsistency which we do not understand, that "it would be required ... that guardians should take the responsibility of a sound and vigilant discrimination between deserving travellers in search of work and professional vagrants not really destitute, by the appointment of officers capable of exercising such discrimination; and that, where practicable, the police should be appointed assistant relieving officers. The forthcoming Order would likewise suggest, in cases where it might be practicable, that the accommodation for deserving travellers should be different from that given to professional vagrants."[313] Yet even for the professional vagrant the promiscuous London casual ward of 1864 was not to be extended. "It was," said the President of the Poor Law Board in 1868, "very desirable that ... each person should have a separate or divided bed place."[314] The new policy, which the President seems to have thought was the London policy of 1864, but which was really a revival of Mr. Charles Buller's policy of 1848, was embodied in a Circular, which admittedly reproduced, in all essentials, the Minute of 1848—the necessity of discrimination, the employment of the police, the issue of tickets to genuine honest wayfarers, their comfortable accommodation in workhouses without task of work, and the desirability of uniformity of treatment in the different unions.[315]
It must be added that, before the end of its tenure of office, the Poor Law Board had become convinced that it had as completely failed to solve the problem of vagrancy as had the Poor Law Commissioners. In the Metropolis it was forced on its attention that "the great increase in the pauper population may be traced to the operation of the Houseless Poor Act, which has practically legalised vagrancy and professional vagabondism."[316] Throughout the whole country the number of vagrants nightly relieved in the workhouse, which had between 1858 and 1862 always been under 2000, rose between 1862 and 1870 to between five and six thousand, and to a maximum of 7946 on 1st July 1868, though falling to less in the exceptionally good trade of 1870-1.[317] The fact is that the boards of guardians felt themselves between the horns of a dilemma, against which the inconsistent see-saw policy of the Central Authority was no protection. If they refused relief to those whom their relieving officers deemed worthless loafers, these bad characters became "masterful beggars," pertinacious tramps, and sources of danger to the countryside, whilst in the bad times of 1866 some of those refused relief suffered hardship and even death.[318] Hence the general reversion to a policy of relief. The Central Authority, under Mr. Goschen's presidency, was at this point considering a new policy, that of penal detention after relief. Mr. Goschen explained to the House of Commons that this would amount, practically, to "a kind of imprisonment," and be "a stronger measure than the administration by the police of the law as at present existing," which had also been proposed, but "if Parliament were inclined to concede power to detain paupers for a longer period than they were now detained, and to keep them at work, he believed that would be a very effectual means of diminishing vagrancy and pauperism."[319]
Women, of whom there were always between 80,000 and 100,000 on outdoor relief, were almost wholly ignored in the Poor Law Legislation of 1847-71, as in the Orders of the Central Authority. The policy of the Central Authority, so far as it appears from the documents, continued to be to permit able-bodied independent women unconditionally to receive outdoor relief, whether or not they were in receipt of wages, so far as concerned the unions under the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order; and to forbid outdoor relief to such women in unions under the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order, whether or not this Order was accompanied by an Outdoor Labour Test Order (for men).[320]
The women dependent on able-bodied men, whether themselves able-bodied or not, might be maintained in their homes, on condition of their husbands being employed in test work, not only in all unions under the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order, but also in those in which the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order was accompanied by a Labour Test Order. On the other hand, such women, however feeble or infirm, were not allowed to be maintained in their homes, even if their husbands were willing to do test work, in those unions in which the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order was alone in force. No reason appears for these differences in policy as to the method of relief of identical categories of women in the different geographical regions into which the Central Authority had divided England and Wales. But although the policy of the Central Authority with regard to women remained, in each of the three regions into which England was divided by these Orders, apparently unchanged, the regions themselves, as we have mentioned, were being silently altered. The great enlargement of the territory to which the laxer Order was applied and the narrow limitation of the territory governed by the stricter Order, involved an enormous extension of the outdoor relief to women permitted by the Central Authority.