“Workhouse!  Yes—­there was something.  In our history lessons.  I remember now.  The Labour Department ousted the workhouse.  It grew—­partly—­out of something—­you, perhaps, may remember it—­an emotional religious organisation called the Salvation Army—­that became a business company.  In the first place it was almost a charity.  To save people from workhouse rigours.  There had been a great agitation against the workhouse.  Now I come to think of it, it was one of the earliest properties your Trustees acquired.  They bought the Salvation Army and reconstructed it as this.  The idea in the first place was to organise the labour of starving homeless people.”

“Yes.”

“Nowadays there are no workhouses, no refuges and charities, nothing but that Department.  Its offices are everywhere.  That blue is its colour.  And any man, woman or child who comes to be hungry and weary and with neither home nor friend nor resort, must go to the Department in the end—­or seek some way of death.  The Euthanasy is beyond their means—­for the poor there is no easy death.  And at any hour in the day or night there is food, shelter and a blue uniform for all comers—­that is the first condition of the Department’s incorporation—­and in return for a day’s shelter the Department extracts a day’s work, and then returns the visitor’s proper clothing and sends him or her out again.”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps that does not seem so terrible to you.  In your time men starved in your streets.  That was bad.  But they died—­men.  These people in blue—.  The proverb runs:  ‘Blue canvas once and ever.’  The Department trades in their labour, and it has taken care to assure itself of the supply.  People come to it starving and helpless—­they eat and sleep for a night and day, they work for a day, and at the end of the day they go out again.  If they have worked well they have a penny or so—­enough for a theatre or a cheap dancing place, or a kinematograph story, or a dinner or a bet.  They wander about after that is spent.  Begging is prevented by the police of the ways.  Besides, no one gives.  They come back again the next day or the day after—­brought back by the same incapacity that brought them first.  At last their proper clothing wears out, or their rags get so shabby that they are ashamed.  Then they must work for months to get fresh.  If they want fresh.  A great number of children are born under the Department’s care.  The mother owes them a month thereafter—­the children they cherish and educate until they are fourteen, and they pay two years’ service.  You may be sure these children are educated for the blue canvas.  And so it is the Department works.”

“And none are destitute in the city?”

“None.  They are either in blue canvas or in prison.  We have abolished destitution.  It is engraved upon the Department’s checks.”

“If they will not work?”