result may have been exactly the opposite. The records of the Central Authority between 1843 and 1847 would show to what extent and in what kind of cases its sanction to these cases of outdoor relief was given or refused; and whether, according to the statistics, it was not given more frequently and even as a matter of course, where test work was obligatory as a condition, as compared with cases in which test work was not required. If this was so, not only did union differ from union in the extent to which outdoor relief to the able-bodied was sanctioned by the Central Authority, but it may be that the statistics would show that in this respect, sex differed from sex--such outdoor relief being freely granted and lightly sanctioned to able-bodied men from whom test work was exacted; and sanctioned with greater stringency in the case of the able-bodied independent women from whom no such test was exacted. (ii.) _In the Workhouse_ When "the able-bodied and their families" entered the workhouse, we find the Central Authority prescribing a classification altogether different from that applied to outdoor paupers. The very category of the "able-bodied and their families" disappears. It was, of course, inevitable that this should happen. In any institution, infants, boys, girls, sick and healthy adults, male and female, required different treatments. But, to the confusion of every one concerned, the Central Authority retained, for its workhouse classification, as for the entirely different classification of outdoor paupers, the same adjective of "able-bodied," without even explaining that it was here used in an altogether different sense. As usual in the documents of this period, there is no definition of the term. But whenever it occurs in the regulations affecting the workhouse, the term "able-bodied" was apparently intended by the Central Authority to denote all persons not being either children, "the aged and infirm," or "the sick." If the draughtsman of the General Consolidated Order of 1847 had been aware of the need for a definition clause, he would presumably have said that in that Order the term "able-bodied" should denote those persons above the age of childhood, and below that of "the aged," who for the time being were in the enjoyment of normal health. This class, it will be seen, differs considerably from that referred to in the preamble of the section in the 1834 Act under which outdoor relief to the able-bodied was to have been abolished; namely, persons (with their families) "who at the time of applying for or receiving such relief were wholly or partially _in the employment of individuals_."[119] The Act thus pointed to the capacity to obtain employment for hire, at any wages whatsoever, whatever may have been the state of health, as the essential characteristic of being "able-bodied." This, too, was the construction placed on the term when used in the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order,