[180] General Order, 31st December 1844, art. 2, in Eleventh Annual Report, 1845, pp. 16, 72; General Consolidated Order, 24th July 1847, art. 54. _H._--_The Aged and Infirm_ As with the sick, so with the aged and infirm, neither the Report nor the Act of 1834 had suggested any change in the current policy of outdoor relief. Nor did the Central Authority prescribe any new policy with regard to this class. It is to be noted that there is the usual absence of definition. The aged and the infirm are always referred to as forming one and the same class. (The word "impotent," used in the Report of 1834, seems to have been silently dropped.) It should be noted also that the class of the "aged and infirm" was not restricted to the infirm aged. The question of age did not enter in at all. What was meant was the class of persons permanently incapacitated, whether from old age, physical defect, or chronic debility, from obtaining any paid employment. The essential characteristic of "the aged and infirm" (like that of "children") was indeed the precise opposite of that of "the able-bodied." The latter always meant (for outdoor relief) those who were actually or potentially in employment for hire. The "aged and infirm" were those (not being children) who could not possibly get employment for any hire, however small; and together with the "children" and "the able-bodied" they made up in the eyes of the Central Authority the whole pauper universe. It was, as we have seen, universally assumed that the various prohibitions or regulations of outdoor relief to the able-bodied did not apply to "aged and infirm persons." These persons were, indeed, expressly made exceptions from the first universal rule prohibiting outdoor relief to any one, in the "Form of Consolidated Order for the Administration of Relief in Town Unions."[181] In the succeeding Orders prohibiting or regulating outdoor relief, all mention of them is omitted, as not falling within the class of "the able-bodied and their families" to which alone these orders applied. In 1839 the Central Authority definitely laid it down "that we do not require aged and infirm paupers to be relieved only in the workhouse," and that "it is not our intention to issue any such rule."[182] The discretion of the local authorities in the matter of outdoor relief to this class was thus left as absolutely unfettered as before; and we can find in the published documents of this period of 1834-47 no direction or advice by the Central Authority on the subject, and no indication that it had any new policy. [181] p. 92 of Second Annual Report, 1836. [182] Report on the Further Amendment of the Poor Law, 1839, pp. 53, 61.