It is easy to understand this general reluctance to work out, from the materials themselves, the Poor Law history of the last three-quarters of a century. As with all nineteenth-century history, the extent, the variety, and the intricacy of the various sources are simply overwhelming. The number of official records--Statutes, Orders, Circulars, Minutes, Reports, Letters, etc.--dealt with for the present small volume (although we have confined ourselves in the main to the publications of the Central Authority itself, and have not been able to consult the manuscript records and letter-books of more than a score of the Boards of Guardians) runs into, literally, tens of thousands. So great a mass of documentary material, without arrangement, unclassified, unindexed, formless, and void of any obvious significance, could be dealt with only by a systematic exploration. We may here describe, as an instance of sociological method, the plan that we adopted. What obscured the history was the manner in which masses of heterogeneous facts were heaped together. To read, one after another, these complicated Orders and lengthy Reports, each dealing with all kinds of paupers and various methods of relief, was but to accumulate confusion. They resembled a heap of geological conglomerates which could not be assayed until they had been broken up in such a way as to sort the different materials into separate homogeneous parcels. We discarded all idea of making précis, summaries, or analyses of particular statutes or orders, believing that in this way brevity is gained only at the expense of omitting important qualifications. After the choice of a provisional scheme of classification, to which careful thought was given, the expressions of policy embodied in each document were all severally copied on loose sheets of paper of even size and shape. Every prescription or dictum conveying an expression of policy with regard to a particular class of paupers was placed upon a separate sheet. Thus, a single Order or Circular might yield items relating to women, to children, to persons on Outdoor Relief, to the sick, to the aged, and so on. However many and however closely related were the classes to which the same prescription applied, it was noted on a separate sheet for each of them, with the date and place and exact source. To deal in this way, with scrupulous accuracy and exhaustiveness, with all the Statutes, all the General Orders, all the Special Orders, all the Circulars, all the published Minutes, all the official reports, and all the letters of the Central Authority to which we could gain access absorbed something like nine months' continuous work. But for the first time order was evolved out of chaos. It was easy to sort the loose sheets by