After 1890 we find the responsibility of the Poor Law authorities for all the outdoor paupers beginning to be recognised by the inspectorate. "The absolute responsibility of the guardians for the material well-being of every one who is in receipt of outdoor relief,"[580] said Mr. Davy in 1893, had been officially recognised by the District Nurses Order, to which we shall recur. "If any relief at all is given to an applicant," Mr. Davy laid it down, "it is the plain duty of the guardians _to take precautions_ to insure that ... the pauper is sufficiently fed, clothed, and lodged."[581] This was notoriously not the case in many unions, the children especially being in an evil plight. "In many unions," said Mr. Baldwyn Fleming, in 1891, "the relieving officer and the inspector of nuisances could show guardians cases ... where large families are living in cottages too small for them, and the accommodation is in almost every respect unsatisfactory, where the children have little but rags to cover them by day or night, where school attendance is avoided to the utmost, where the feeding only just escapes starvation, where the physical and moral education of the children are equally impracticable, where infant life is one constant struggle with misery and privation."[582] The demoralising association of the outdoor pauper children with the pay-station was specially denounced by another inspector. "What," he said, "is the sense, I would ask--I _do_ ask in board rooms--of all this trouble and outlay to put the children into cottage homes or scattered homes, to keep them, in fact, altogether away from the workhouse, if while doing all this the very same authority permit the precisely similar children of the outdoor poor to haunt the pay-stations, to hang about workhouse gates, or to sit mixed up in waiting-rooms with adult paupers.... The children, early in life, often at times when they ought to be at school, have their eyes opened to the facility with which by exaggerating your impecunious condition, 2s. 6d. or 3s. a week can be got without the labour of earning it.... The master of one of the board schools had written ... to complain that three children systematically were kept from school on a particular day of the week for the purpose of drawing relief due to their parents."[583] [580] Mr. Davy's Report, in Twenty-Second Annual Report, 1892-3, p. 72. [581] _Ibid._ [582] Mr. Baldwyn Fleming's Report, in Twentieth Annual Report, 1890-1, p. 222. [583] Mr. Kennedy's Report, in Twenty-eighth Annual Report, 1898-9, pp. 168-9.