The probability being that if the tramp and search be often repeated or long-continued, the desire for, and the ability to undergo, regular work will disappear.
But physical and mental inferiority, together with the absence of moral purpose, have a great deal to say with regard to the number of our unemployed.
If you ask me the source of this stunted manhood, I point you to the narrow streets of the underworld.

Thence they issue, and thence alone.
Do you ask the cause?
The causes are many! First and foremost stands that all-pervading cause--the housing of the poor.

Who can enumerate the thousands that have breathed the fetid air of the miserable dwelling-places in our slums?
Who dare picture how they live and sleep, as they lie, unripe sex with sex, for mutual taint?
I dare not, and if I did no publisher could print it.
Who dare describe the life of a mother-wife, whose husband and children have become dependent upon her earnings! I dare not! Who dare describe the exact life and doings of four families living in a little house intended for one family?
Who can describe the life, speech, actions and atmosphere of such places?
I cannot, for the task would be too disgusting! For tens of thousands of people are allowed, or compelled, to live and die under those conditions.

How can vigorous manhood or pure womanhood come out of them?
Ought we to expect, have we any right to expect, manhood and womanhood born and bred under such conditions to be other than blighted?
Whether we expect it or not matters but little, for we have this mass of blighted humanity with us, and, like an old man of the sea, it is a burden upon our back, a burden that is not easily got rid of.
What are we doing with this burden in the present?
How are we going to prevent it in the future?
are two serious questions that must be answered, and quickly, too, or something worse will happen to us.
The authorities must see to it at once that children shall have as much air and breathing space in their homes by night as they have in the schools by day.
What sense can there be in demanding and compelling a certain amount of air space in places where children are detained for five and a half hours, and then allow those children to stew in apologies for rooms, where the atmosphere is vile beyond description, and where they are crowded indiscriminately for the remaining hours?
This is the question of the day and the hour.

Drink, foreign invasion, the House of Lords or the House of Commons, Tariff Reform or Free Trade, none of these questions, no, nor the whole lot of them combined, compare for one moment in importance with this one awful question.
Give the poor good airy housing at a reasonable rent, and half the difficulties against which our nation runs its thick head would disappear.