But at the end of twenty years the Army cannot point to one single cause of social distress that it has removed, or to one single act which it has promoted that has dealt a death-blow at one social evil....
"A more serious question, one which lies at the root of all indiscriminate charity, is the value to the community of these shelters.
So far as the men in the shelters are benefited by them, they do not elevate them, either physically or morally.

A proportion--what proportion ?--are weeded out, entirely by the voluntary action of the men themselves, and given temporary work, carrying sandwich-boards, addressing envelopes, sorting paper, etc.; but the cause of their social dilapidation remains unaltered.

They enter the shelter, pay their twopence or fourpence as the case may be (and few are allowed to enter unless they do), they listen to some moral advice once a week, with which they are surfeited inside and outside the shelter, they go to bed, and next morning leave the shelter to face the streets as they came in, The shelter gets no nearer to the cause of their depravity than it does to the economic cause of their failure, or to the economic remedy which the State must eventually introduce....
"The nomads of our civilisation wander past us in their fringy, dirty attire night by night.

If a man stops us in the streets and tells us that he is starving, and we offer him a ticket to a labour home or a night shelter, he will tell you that the chances are one out of ten if he will procure admission.

The better class of the submerged, or those who use the provision for the submerged in order to gratify their own selfishness, have taken possession of the vacancies, and so they wander on.