We turn first to the Report signed by the Majority of the Commissioners, including those members who were, or had been, members of the Charity Organisation Society. It is not easy to be sure what are the principles which the signatories of this Report wish to see accepted by the public. The whole wording of the lengthy document points in one direction, and nearly all its definite proposals in another. Thus, in the drastic criticism of the present Poor Law; in the phraseology running all through the Report, and in some of the detailed recommendations, we find a very definite, if generally tacit, abandonment of the "Principles of 1834," and a seeming adoption of what we have called the "Principles of 1907," as set forth in the preceding chapters. Indeed, the Majority Report is in one place explicit in its repudiation of the "Principles of 1834," arguing that, whatever may have been their validity three-quarters of a century ago, they are no longer applicable even to the able-bodied. "The administrators of the present Poor Law," it was expressly declared without dissent from any Commissioner, "are in fact endeavouring to apply the rigid system of 1834 to a condition of affairs which it was never intended to meet. What is wanted is not to abolish the Poor Law, but to widen, strengthen, and humanise the Poor Law, so as to make it respond to a demand for a more considerate, elastic, and, so far as possible, curative treatment of the Able-bodied."[845] This interpretation of the Majority Report finds support in the fact that what we have termed the "Principles of 1907" are repeatedly endorsed. Thus, the Principle of Curative Treatment is expressed almost on every page. It is, in fact, owing to the assertion and reassertion of this principle that the Majority Report owed its instantaneous popularity with the benevolent public. In sharp contrast with every previous Poor Law Report, this one urged that the children were to be brought up in the best possible way; the sick were to be given the most curative treatment; the mentally defective were to be treated solely with a view to their amelioration; the physically defective and the infirm were to have the specialised treatment and the appliances best calculated to remedy their defects; even the able-bodied, whether the unemployed or the vagrants, the honest working-men or the wastrels, were to be dealt with by home treatment or in establishments of which the aim was to be training and reform. The Principle of Curative Treatment was made, in fact, the basis of all the methods proposed for the treatment of all the different sections of the pauper host. [845] Par. 337 of Part VI. of Majority Report.