This is a nineteenth-century illustration of a tread wheel that was used in British workhouses and prisons to grind grain or pump water into the institution. Much of the official sources speak of the tread wheel as a particularly suitable deterrent for “vagrants,” a term that encompassed an incredible variety of people including drunks, prostitutes, migrant laborers, the disabled, and orphans too old for the orphanage. The more loathsome the punishment for unemployment, the more quickly ne’er-do-wells would find employment, and the more likely they would be to behave well enough and work hard enough to stay employed.
I don’t really know how this abhorrent bill is any different.
Physical coercion and abuse of the unemployed didn’t do anything to reduce unemployment in Victorian Britain. It simply made the guys in charge feel better for doing something visibly “tough” about the thing that everyone agreed was a problem.
