man suffering from disease finds it made more easy for him to get cured without infecting his neighbours, and made more disagreeable for him not to take all the necessary precautions. The labour exchanges and the farm colonies aim at making it more easy for the wage-earner to get a situation; perhaps the reformatory establishment, with powers of detention, is needed to make it more disagreeable for him not to accept and retain that situation. We must, in fact, recognise that the "principles of 1907," to which experience has gradually brought the Central Authority, "hang together" in theory and practice no less than did those of 1834. _D._--NO MAN'S LAND But although the aforesaid "principles of 1907" demonstrably emerge in the statutes and orders, circulars and particular decisions of the Central Authority, and although they have severally received the most authoritative sanction for particular classes or on particular occasions, they have, as a whole, not been consciously substituted for the "principles of 1834." Indeed, it is open to question whether successive presidents and particular officials, if suddenly cross-examined, might not reveal a complete unconsciousness of there being any new principles at all, and whether they might not profess to be still standing on the policy of 1834! The result is, on the one hand, a lack of clear exposition of policy, and, on the other, a failure to apply any policy at all, either systematically or with the necessary qualifications and safeguards. Accordingly, the boards of guardians are in a state of hopeless bewilderment. They dimly realise that, in one crucial instance after another, the Principle of National Uniformity, the Principle of Less Eligibility, and the Workhouse System, have been authoritatively abandoned. They vaguely perceive, with regard to one section of paupers after another, that the Local Government Board directs them to act upon lines inconsistent with those laid down in 1834. But they are not explicitly told what are the new principles, to what classes of paupers they are to be applied, and what safeguards and qualifications they demand. There is, in fact, to-day, a sort of "No Man's Land" in Poor Law administration, in which the principles of 1834 have been _de facto_ abandoned, without the principles of 1907 being consciously substituted. Owing to this lack of central direction, we find diversity without deliberation, indulgence without cure, and relief without discipline. It is an incident of this failure consciously and explicitly to adopt deliberate principles of action, that no attention has been paid to their limitations and qualifications. The principles of 1834 were such as could be mechanically and universally applied, if only any Government had dared to do it. The principles to which the experience of the past seventy years has unconsciously led the Central Authority need to be carefully thought out in their application to particular classes.