F.K.W.;baker.Been board-carrying to-day,earned one shilling,Hours 9till 5.I've been on this kind of life six years.Used to work in a bakery,but had congestion of the brain,and couldn't stand the heat.I've been in about every Casual Ward in England.They treat men too harshly.Have to work very hard,too.Has had to work whilst really unfit.At Peckham (known as Camberwell)Union,was quite unable to do it through weakness,and appealed to the doctor,who,taking the part of the other officials,as usual,refused to allow him to forego the work.Cheeked the doctor,telling him he didn't understand his work;result,got three days'imprisonment.Before going to a Casual Ward at all,I spent seven consecutive nights on the Embankment,and at last went to the Ward.
The result of the deliberate policy of making the night refuge for the unemployed labourer as disagreeable as possible,and of placing as many obstacles as possible in the way of his finding work the following day,is,no doubt,to minimise the number of Casuals,and without question succeeds.In the whole of London the number of Casuals in the wards at night is only 1,136.That is to say,the conditions which are imposed are so severe,that the majority of the Out-of-Works prefer to sleep in the open air,taking their chance of the inclemency and mutability of our English weather,rather than go through the experience of the Casual Ward.
It seems to me that such a mode of coping with distress does not so much meet the difficulty as evade it.It is obvious that an apparatus,which only provides for 1,136persons per night,is utterly unable to deal with the numbers of the homeless Out-of-Works.But if by some miracle we could use the Casual Wards as a means of providing for all those who are seeking work from day to day,without a place in which to lay their heads,save the kerbstone of the pavement or the back of a seat on the Embankment,they would utterly fail to have any appreciable effect upon the mass of human misery with which we have to deal.