The Principle of Curative Treatment--that is, of bringing about in the applicant actual physical or mental improvement, so as to render him positively more fit than if he had abstained from applying for relief--may be considered the direct opposite of the Principle of Less Eligibility. It might, indeed, be termed the Principle of Greater Eligibility. This principle has been gradually evolved by the Central Authority in the course of the last fifty or sixty years; but it has characterised in particular the administration of the Local Government Board ever since its establishment in 1871. We see it most thoroughly applied to the sick and the children; though not yet to all sections even of these classes. With regard to the sick, the policy since 1865 has been to get them out of the general workhouse, and to get established, for their treatment, separate institutions as well built, as well equipped, and professionally as well staffed as the most efficient hospitals. The whole object is to cure the patients in the most rapid and thorough fashion. The very idea of "deterring" them from entrance has been avowedly discarded. Hence, in those unions in which the policy of the Central Authority has been thoroughly carried out, and where the poorer classes have (but for the Poor Law) to rely on their own independent exertions, those of them who, in illness, accept Poor Law relief, find their condition in every way more eligible than those who do not apply for it, or who are refused it because they are deemed "not destitute."