[848] Par. 420 of Part IV.; and pars. 92, 99-100 and 148a of Part IX. of Majority Report. To this principle of placing all forms of public assistance under a general Public Assistance Authority (and thus classing all the recipients as paupers) the Majority make a remarkable exception. They acquiesce, so far as England and Wales are concerned, in the proposed taking out of the Poor Law of all the various grades of the Mentally Defective--the lunatics, the idiots, the feeble-minded, and the chronically inebriate--and the treatment of this great class, amounting to 20 per cent of the present pauper host, not in respect of their destitution, but, whatever their pecuniary circumstances, in respect of their mental defect, by an authority specialising on that branch of administration. [849] Par. 143 of Part IV. of Majority Report. [850] "The Majority Report," by Professor Bernard Bosanquet (_Sociological Review_, April 1909). [851] _Ibid._ In this cogent argument for the retention of the Category of the Destitute, and of one Authority, and one Authority only, for all classes of destitute persons, we see two distinct and separate assumptions, one as to fact, and the other as to social expediency. We have first the suggestion that, in all classes of persons who need maintenance at the hands of the State, there is, as a matter of fact, a moral defect, common to the whole class and requiring specific treatment. Secondly, we see creeping out from behind this suggestion a further assumption as to the policy which ought to be pursued by the Poor Law Authority. This Authority, which is to have in its charge all the heterogeneous population of infants, children, sick and mentally defective persons, the aged and the infirm, the widows, the vagrants, and the unemployed, is to treat them, not with a single eye, to what is best calculated to turn them, or any of them, into efficient citizens, not even with a single eye to what will most successfully remedy the "moral defect" which they are assumed all to possess, but with the quite different object of warning off or deterring, "by expectation and example," other persons from applying for like treatment. In other words, we must, by keeping all the different varieties of people who require State aid under one Authority, and under one that assumes the existence of this "moral defect," retain for all alike, not only the "stigma of pauperism," but also a method of provision which will "deter" others from coming to be treated. We find ourselves, in short, back at the "Principles of 1834."[852] [852] The Minority Commissioners took up the discussion on this fundamental point in the Minority Report for Scotland (Cd. 4922); and we give in an appendix to the present volume (Appendix B) the detailed answer there afforded to Professor Bosanquet's argument. _The Reversion to 1834_