[490] The first notice that we have seen of the fact that some districts contain "a much higher proportion of the weak and old," than others, and that some have also a much higher rate of mortality among husbands than others, which vitiates any simple comparison of their pauperism, is in a Report by Mr. Culley (inspector) in 1873 (Third Annual Report, 1873-4, pp. 66, 72-3). But the hint was not acted on in the tables of statistics used by the inspectors. Moreover, some of the other recommendations of the Circular implied, though they did not express, a suggestion that the "offer of the House" might be used as a means of preventing the aged and the sick from coming on the rates at all. Quite a new stress was laid on getting contributions from relatives, and on the most vigilant inquiry into circumstances, recommendations which certainly applied to the aged and infirm and to the sick, and which seemed to carry with them the hint that, if confronted with the workhouse, even the aged and the sick would be maintained by their relations. Whether or not the Central Authority can be held in these years to have deliberately adopted the new policy of the offer of the workhouse for the aged and infirm and for the sick, as well as for the able-bodied, it was this policy which, from 1871 onwards, was increasingly pressed on boards of guardians by the abler and more energetic of the inspectors. We cannot find any official document in which any inspector explicitly committed himself to the statement that the time had come when outdoor relief should, as a matter of principle, be refused to the aged and infirm, or to the sick, as had long been the official advice with regard to the able-bodied.[491] But it was in these years that these inspectors took to circulating among their boards of guardians the comparative tables showing their relative position in order of merit according to the smallness of their out-relief--always without making any distinction between the out-relief to the aged and the sick on the one hand, and that to the able-bodied on the other. In their published reports on their districts we see the inspectors taking the same tone and using the same unguarded phrases implying the inherent badness of outdoor relief (without any limitation to the able-bodied), that marked the Circular of 1871. The minutes of the boards of guardians of this period occasionally preserve a record of, or contain a reference to the inspector's letters or personal advice to the same effect.[492]