larger number already under the care of the Local Pension Committee; whilst those able-bodied persons who are being relieved as vagrants or paupers, together with the "Unemployed" now on the registers of the Distress Committees, will come under the supervision and control of the new National Authority for the able-bodied, of which the beginning is seen in the Labour Exchanges Act of 1909. This, we suggest, is plainly the lesson of the day. The gist of the Minority Report so far, at any rate, as the non-able-bodied are concerned may be put even more shortly. The Poor Law and the Poor Law Authorities--necessary at an earlier stage of Local Government, when destitution would otherwise have gone undealt with--can now simply be merged in the ordinary functions of municipal and county administration Only in this way can we put an end to the costly and extravagant overlapping that now exists between the Poor Law Authority, on the one hand, and all the other Authorities on the other. _The Principle of Prevention_ From the Minority Report proposals, thus succinctly put, we have so far omitted what is really the kernel of the whole matter. These ordinary functions of municipal and county administration--the hospitals and schools and asylums and the domiciliary treatment of one kind or another--are costly; and they are apparently especially costly the more consciously and the more systematically we administer them on the Principles of Curative Treatment, Compulsion, and Universal Provision. If we hand over to the Local Education Authorities those children for whom the Boards of Guardians still provide; to the Local Health Authorities those infants, sick and infirm, who are still under the Poor Law; to the Local Lunacy Authorities the feeble-minded still retained in the workhouse; to the Local Pension Authorities the aged who have not yet got national pensions; and to the Unemployment Authorities, local or national, the vagrants and other able-bodied persons who are still among the paupers, will not this involve, in comparison with the cost under the Board of Guardians, a great increase of public expenditure, and can any such increase be justified? We need not, at this point, stay to argue that, owing to the practical abandonment of the "Principles of 1834," the administration of the Board of Guardians has itself become very costly; that children in Poor Law Schools and patients in Poor Law Infirmaries often cost more per head than children in the boarding schools of the Local Education Authority and patients in the hospitals of the Local Health Authority; and that seeing that the very existence of overlapping Public Authorities and duplication of work is, in itself, a wasteful extravagance, there is no reason to expect any increase in net cost from the mere fact of the transfer.