It must be said that, between 1834 and 1847, there seems to have been entertained by some persons of authority and repute a simpler and most drastic view of the policy intended by the Report and Act of 1834, namely, the abolition, as soon as practicable, of all outdoor relief to all classes of paupers; and the substitution, in all cases, of the offer of admission to the workhouse. This was intended to ensure that the condition of the persons relieved should be "less eligible," so as to induce them and their relatives to avoid maintenance out of the poor rate. It is clear, as we have shown, that neither the Inquiry Commissioners of 1834, nor Parliament, nor yet the Poor Law Commissioners themselves between 1834 and 1847, ever took that view. They were too fully conscious of the impossibility of so dealing with the great mass of the sick and the aged and infirm, and they had not at all made up their minds about widows with children, or even about unencumbered independent women. Harriet Martineau, indeed, who had not before her the statistics showing to what an enormous extent the pauperism--even that of 1834--was made up of the aged and infirm and the sick, could naïvely depict, in her _Poor Law Tales_, the complete success of an absolutely inflexible offer of "the House" to every applicant without exception; the result being an entirely de-pauperised parish, and the overseer turning the key in the door of an absolutely empty workhouse. What is more remarkable is to find even able subordinates of the Poor Law Commissioners talking as if they took this view. "It appears to me," wrote Sir Francis Head in 1835, "that we have no discretion allowed to us to deliberate whether the workhouse system is good or bad. Our Poor Law Amendment Act is physic which the legislature, in the character of physician, has prescribed to remedy an acknowledged evil. We are called upon to administer it, and it seems to me that the only discretion granted to us is to determine what period is to elapse before _all outdoor relief is to be stopped_."[283] [283] MS. letter, Sir Francis Head to S. L., 6th November 1835. It is perhaps a question whether Sir Francis Head really meant what he said; or whether he was not speaking merely of outdoor relief to the able-bodied.