It is, to begin with, an inherent drawback of any general Destitution Authority for the work of Curative Treatment that it is necessarily a "mixed" Authority, having to deal, not with patients suffering from any one disease, but with persons of the most diverse needs, and requiring treatment of very different nature. To entrust to one and the same Authority the care of the infants and the aged, the children and the able-bodied adults, the sick and the healthy, maids and widows; and to instruct that Authority to adopt "curative and restorative treatment," is inevitably to concentrate attention, not on the different methods that their several necessities require, but on their one common attribute of destitution, and on the one common remedy of "relief" upon whatever terms, strict or lax, that may be in fashion. To a Destitution Authority, however constituted, a sick person is not wholly a patient, he is also a pauper; and too often his character of pauper interferes with his being regarded with a single eye as a patient to be cured. To such an Authority a destitute child is not merely, or even mainly, a future citizen, to be nurtured and trained in the wisest way for the service of the community; the fact that the child is a pauper cannot by a Destitution Authority be forgotten, and all experience shows that this remembrance injuriously affects what is done for the child. A further drawback is that the "mixed" Authority, having to deal simultaneously with all sections and all kinds of persons, tends invariably to a service of "mixed" officials; and with a Destitution Authority this service is almost necessarily composed of "Destitution" officials. They are not, and can scarcely be, specially trained to deal with infants, or with children, or with able-bodied adults, or with the sick, or with the mentally defective, or with the aged. The specialist training and experience that they acquire is not with any of these, but with the one common attribute of destitution. Thus the typical Relieving Officer or Workhouse Master has not, and can seldom hope to have, the specialist knowledge that would fit him to be a competent inspector of boarded-out girls, a useful guardian of feeble-minded boys, a successful administrator of a Rescue Home, a skilled superintendent of a phthisis sanatorium, a happy adviser in discovering situations for men out of work, or an expert trainer for those who have to be prepared for new occupations. Even when public-spirited Boards of Guardians, under the wisest administrative guidance, persistently strive to make "a classified Poor Law," they fail to attain, in fact, the classification that they desire. This is seen in the persistence of the General Mixed Workhouse, in spite of the explicit condemnation of a succession of expert critics. It is seen in the fact that, after twenty years of "scattered homes" for children, we still find the Guardians unable to resist the temptation of putting into them, along with the children,