We have to note, in the first place, that the Majority Report lays the utmost stress on the importance of retaining in each locality what is definitely a "Destitution Authority." "It should," they declare, "be a fundamental condition of the assistance system of the future that the responsibility for the due and effective relief of all necessitous persons at the public expense should be in the hands of one, and only one, authority in each County and County Borough."[847] To this principle they recur again and again as of paramount importance. In retaining this General Destitution Authority, and in emphasising the necessity for the treatment of all sections--the infants, the children, the sick, the aged, the prematurely incapacitated, the able-bodied unemployed--being committed to its charge, the Majority Report may fairly claim to be standing on the same ground as the authors of the 1834 Report, though with a significant difference. To the Royal Commission of 1834 the single all-embracing Destitution Authority was not a matter of principle at all, but a necessity, which no one questioned. Throughout the whole country there had been only one kind of Local Authority which gave any sort of public assistance to the poor, and that was the Poor Law Authority. The 1834 Report could, accordingly, take it for granted that all sections of the persons to be relieved at the public expense on the ground of their necessities must be dealt with, as destitute persons, by one and the same authority. In 1909 the position has become quite different. There have grown up, since 1834, other public authorities in each district, which provide, independently of the Poor Law, this or that form of public assistance to persons who require it, sometimes to all who apply, sometimes to those only who prove their need. The Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, the Local Lunacy Authorities, the Local Pension Authorities, and the Local Unemployed Authorities are, in fact, spending in the aggregate on the children, the sick, the mentally defective, the aged and the able-bodied unemployed, in their several forms of public assistance, out of the same fund of rates and taxes, _more than twice as much every year as all the Poor Law Authorities put together_. To the Royal Commission of 1909 the retention of a general Destitution Authority, dealing with all sections of destitute persons as destitute persons, was, therefore, not a necessity. It was a deliberate choice, and we find them erecting it into a principle. This principle does not, as might perhaps be supposed, apply only to the provision of maintenance. It is expressly asserted that the schooling and industrial training of the persons relieved and the medical attendance of the sick, so far as it is provided at the public expense, must equally form part of the work of the new Poor Law Authorities. Even the provision of Day Industrial Schools for destitute uncared-for children, of public