arrange with the county councils to teach these children in the public elementary schools. Such arrangements, with the consequent payments between two authorities, will be no longer required. The many thousands of State children in the separate poor law schools would be brought into the common educational system. Another matter of complex negotiations between guardians and education authorities is necessitated by the recently introduced system of the provision of food for indigent children at the instance of the education authority but by the poor law authority.

PERSONS OF UNSOUND MIND.

County councils have to provide asylums for the insane and to pay for some of the inmates, while the guardians pay for the others. SANITATION.

This is supposed to be in the sole control of the local sanitary authority, but medical relief, that is the provision of medical advice for the very poor, is furnished by the guardians. When they adopt the severe policy of reducing all relief to a minimum or of treating medical relief as a loan, the poor are discouraged from seeking prompt professional advice in cases of disease apparently slight, which yet may be infectious, and thus the guardians by their parsimony set at naught the best laid schemes of the sanitary authorities to stamp out zymotic diseases by early notifications and prompt removals to their hospitals.

HOSPITALS.

Here, again, are two competing authorities with any amount of overlapping. For the very poor the guardians provide infirmaries. For the less poor the local sanitary authority builds infectious disease hospitals, and according to modern medicine very few common diseases are now left in the non-infectious category. For these few, and for accidents, though urban sanitary authorities may and ought to supply the need, private charity provides a host of competing institutions with disastrous results in economy and often in efficiency.

UNEMPLOYED.

Finally, for the unemployed, parliament has recently enacted the creation of a new and cumbrous joint authority, consisting of delegates from the guardians and other local authorities, to undertake work which it could not entrust to the administrators of the hated poor law, and yet which could not be done without their co-operation.

The Relief of the Poor.

It is impossible in the present report to deal with the changes in the administration of relief which would naturally and easily follow on the adoption of our proposals. We have only space for the briefest outline.

INDOOR RELIEF.

The transfer to county and county borough councils of the complete oversight of the institutions in which the indoor poor are

maintained will lead at once to a fuller system of classification. In place of a number of workhouses, each with its little inefficient departments devoted to a few grades or classes of the poor, a quite elaborate system will be possible, each type of poor being housed in a separate institution adapted as to staff and regimen to the needs of the inmates. At the same time care must be taken to respect the feelings of those, especially amongst the aged, who desire not to be removed to an unnecessary distance from their old homes, and thus to be deprived of visits from their relatives and friends.

OUTDOOR Relief.

The total number of authorities concerned in the arduous and difficult task of awarding out-relief will be increased by the scheme we propose, as urban districts and non-county boroughs now usually forming parts of a union together with contiguous rural parishes, will in future look after their own areas themselves. In county and metropolitan boroughs the number of cases to be considered is very large, and possibly some modification of the plan already in operation in one of the unions of Manchester will be widely adopted. The guardians draw up a very elaborate and carefully thought out scheme of classification of all possible cases, and decide on the form and amount of relief to be granted to each class. The decision on the evidence of the class to which each applicant belongs is entrusted in the main to a well-paid superintendent relieving officer, accompanied, in all cases, by a member of the board, as the stipendiary is assisted by the local justices of the peace. This method secures a much better "standardizing" of the cases, with far more uniformity of treatment, whilst it greatly decreases the labor of the elected persons, guardians at present, councillors in the future. Other innovators favor an adaptation of the "Elberfeld" plan, by which the services of volunteer committees are systematically enlisted to examine and report on applicants for relief.

CASUALS.

The care of casuals has no real connection with the provision for the resident poor. The one is properly local; the other is essentially non-local. It is impossible here to sketch more than an outline of this complex and difficult subject. Briefly it may be said that much of the supervision of the casual should everywhere be formally transferred to the police, as in many places it is already. In rural districts whole classes of crimes are committed almost exclusively by tramps, and any change which gave the police official knowledge of them would be to the good. In rural districts the police should issue orders to tramps entitling them to a night's shelter in the casual ward; and for the casual who is not a tramp, but a workman in search of work, railway tickets and ultimately a separate organization of rest houses, in connection either with his trade union or the local labor bureau, should be provided. The habitual casual is an inevitable product of the fluctuations in employment involved by our competitive industrial system; and it is idle to blame him or to

hope to get rid of him whilst that system lasts; but it is none the less necessary to look very sharply after him, if only to rescue his children from the morally destructive effect of his way of life. And no sentimental fancies about the joys of the open road and the simple happy-go-lucky life of the careless wanderer should blind us to the fact that, as a class, the tramp is considered an unqualified nuisance by those dwellers in the country who have most experience of his habits.

The Saving to the Rates.

The startling feature of poor law administration during the past decade has been its steadily rising cost per person relieved. The growing humanitarianism of the age seems to have conquered the guardians with a rush, and the expenditure on poor relief has gone up by leaps and bounds. Where this money is properly spent on giving greater comfort to the aged, better care to the sick, more education to the children, it is all to the good, but it is by no means certain that a spirit of strange lavishness has not led the guardians into unnecessary expenditure on useless buildings and needless officials. We can only here refer the reader to a careful study of this problem, by Miss Edith Sellers, published in the Nineteenth Century Review for September, 1905, under the title of "How the Guardians Spend their Money."

It is, however, fairly certain that the centralization of the management of the poor in the hands of administrators accustomed to large scale business would tend both to economy and to efficiency.

The system so commonly in vogue of compelling the unwilling aged to enter the workhouse by the refusal of out-relief is satisfactory to the self-styled reform school of poor law guardians, but is eminently unsatisfactory to the ratepayer, who has to pay the heavy cost of this unnecessary board and lodging of the unwilling and unhappy veteran.

Diminution of Central Control.

One probable result of the proposed changes would be a marked decrease in the detailed control of the Local Government Board over the doings of the authorities which look after the poor. The cause of this anomaly in our system of local government was clear enough. When every parish was an autonomous and practically irresponsible poor law authority, abuses gradually grew to an enormity almost unparalleled in our history. In order to reform them the government deliberately adopted the new broom policy we have already advocated. But they did not trust the guardians whom they created much more than the parochial authorities which they abolished. A uniform and severe regimen was necessary to cure the social disease which had assumed in various districts very different forms. Vehement local opposition was rightly anticipated to the proposals which parliament had almost unanimously adopted. Resisters of new laws were the reverse of passive seventy years ago, and local autonomy would have been helpless to withstand their violence. The Poor Law Commissioners, the predecessors of the Local Govern

ment Board, were given therefore almost autocratic power to issue Orders having the force of law, both to unions in general and to particular places, and to interfere in every detail of appointment and dismissal of officials, of capital and ordinary expenditure, and of the actual treatment of the poor. This power was necessary at the time, not only to shelter the guardians from unpopularity, to protect the officials and to ensure the systematic carrying out of the new principles, but also to shield the poor from penurious and inconsiderate guardians.

This power has been generally used in a humane and intelligent spirit. But it is no longer necessary, or, at any rate, will no longer be so when the care of the poor forms one of the normal functions of local government. Such control as is exercised by the Board of Education over the educational affairs will be enough and, perhaps, more than enough. Town and county councils will not require to have their every appointment and every expenditure considered and passed upon by a central government department. The advantage of this change will be great. Central government supervision means delay, and delay involves inefficiency and expense and waste of energy. The time for stereotyped methods is past. Subject to the strict maintenance of a national minimum-and this it is the business of the central government to enforce-we want experiment and variety.

Extinction of Pauperism.

But perhaps the chiefest gain of all will be the complete extinction of "pauperism." This is the object of the self-styled "poor law reform party"; this aim we share with them, but we seek it by means wholly different from theirs.

At present, according to law, there are two distinct classes of Englishmen, citizens and paupers, the independent and the dependent, the rulers and the ruled. But in fact both the theory and the practice of the law have broken down. Modern social and political economy tells us that the real line of demarcation is between those who do or have done service to the community which is an adequate return for what they receive from the community, and those wasteful, even criminal, classes, both at the top and at the bottom, who live idly at the expense of the rest. The scientific distinction is between workers and drones, not between citizens and paupers.

In practice, too, the old distinction has disappeared. Medical relief no longer carries the disqualifications of pauperism. Gratuitous schooling is no longer pauperism. Treatment in infectious disease hospitals at the cost of the poor rate is not pauperism. Free vaccination is not pauperism. Unemployment relief under the Act of 1905 is specially designed to keep its recipients clear of the hated poor law. Old age pensions, a proposal universally approved, is to be another form of out-relief which is not to make the recipient a pauper. The modern principle, as we have already said, is communal provision adapted to special needs. This provision must not necessarily involve any stigma or electoral disqualification.

The old category of pauper must henceforth be superseded by two new categories. On the one side are the aged, the temporarily unemployed, the children, whether orphans or those rescued by the State from incompetent parents, and the sick. By all, save the hardest, these are already held blameless. They must be cared for by the community according to their several needs. On the other side are those whose destitution is caused merely by the fact that they are idle and incompetent; those who are a tax on the community, for which they never have done a fair share of work and never will. They must be dealt with under some form of the criminal law, since society will soon recognize to the full that to live without working is a crime. In sociology it is as meaningless to make into one class all persons unable to support themselves without recourse to the rates as it would be in zoology to group together in one order all speciesbirds and bats and butterflies-which are able to support themselves

in the air.

What is wanted, what these proposals will facilitate, is to wipe from the statute book the whole business of poor law and pauperism. The elaborate statistics which the Local Government Board prepares with such diligence, and which the Charity Organization experts summarize with such satisfaction, have, in truth, little or no meaning, because they lump together persons and classes properly unrelated.

Pauperism must be broken up into its component parts. Each class of State-aided poor must be treated according to its needs. The aged veterans of labor must be kept in comfort in their declining years. The sick must be cured with all the resources of medical and surgical art. The children must be brought up to be skilled and intelligent citizens. The weak-minded and incompetent

must be dealt with in farm colonies and in such other ways as are adapted to make the best of them. Finally, the deliberately idle must be set to hard labor, and their social vice, if it may be, sweated out of them.

Already attempts are being made to work on these lines, but they are rendered half-hearted and uncertain because all these different classes are subject to one poor law, and their different needs and deserts are to be met merely by more or less complete "classification of paupers." The ordinary guardian and poor law official regards them all as varieties of the same species, possessing in the main common qualities, ruled by one law, and divided from the rest of mankind by a gulf which must be rendered, as far as may be, impassable.

The application of any rational system of classification no doubt gives rise to endless difficulties in individual cases. Whether idleness and consequent poverty is a fault or a misfortune, whether a man should be held criminally responsible because his brain-power seems to be insufficient to keep him steady at any kind of work, these problems in a thousand forms confront everyone who attempts to lay down rules for the control of other men. But in practice they must be faced, and they are faced. Some conclusion is arrived at,