It must be noted that, whilst the inspectorate was in these years doing its utmost to insist on "the offer of the house" to all able-bodied persons, it was also encouraging boards of guardians to make the workhouse for such persons an exclusively disciplinary institution. This had, as we have mentioned, been suggested by Mr. Corbett in 1868. The pressure on the accommodation of the Metropolitan workhouses, and the mixing together of so many different classes of inmates, made it impossible, Mr. Corbett had pointed out, "to apply the workhouse as a test of destitution to single able-bodied men."[512] "In urging upon boards of guardians in the Metropolis," repeated his successor, Mr. Longley, "as I have lately had occasion to do almost daily, the application of the workhouse test, I have not infrequently been met by the startling admission that the workhouse is attractive to paupers; that there are many persons in the workhouse who could maintain themselves out of doors; and, in short, that the workhouse furnishes no test of destitution. All arguments in support of the workhouse test which assume the existence of a 'well-regulated workhouse' (to use the language of the Poor Law Commissioners of Inquiry, 1833) must fail at once when addressed to guardians whose workhouse offers attractions to the indolent. And I have reason to think that the aversion to the proper and free use of the workhouse which distinguishes many Metropolitan boards of guardians, is in some measure due to the failure of the workhouses, as at present administered, to satisfy the essential conditions of their establishment."[513] [512] Mr. Corbett's Report of 14th January 1868, in Twentieth Annual Report of the Poor Law Board, 1867-8, p. 126; repeated in his Report of 10th August 1871. [513] Office Minute by Mr. Longley, 1873. Much the same words occur in his Annual Report. The "lax discipline of the workhouse" in London is described as tending "to deprive it of its function as a test" (Mr. Longley's Report in Third Annual Report of the Local Government Board, 1873-4, p. 166).