“All State relief should be educational, aiming by the strengthening of character to make the recipient independent.” If the applicant be idle, the State must develop in him an interest in work. It must, therefore, detain him perhaps for years in a workhouse or on a farm; but not to do dull and dreary labour at stone-breaking or oakum-picking. It must give him work which satisfies the human longing to make something, and opens to him the door of hope. If the applicant be ignorant and workless, it must teach him, establishing something like day industrial schools, in which the man would learn and earn, but in which he would feel no desire to stay when other work offers. We must revive the spirit of the principle of 1834, and see that the position of the pauper be not as eligible as that of the independent workman; there must always be a centrifugal force from the centre of relief, driving the relieved to seek work; but this force need not be terror or repression. A system of training, a process of development, would be equally effective in deterring imposition. Scientific treatment of the poor need not, therefore, be inconsistent with that which is most humane. The same principle as to the primary importance of developing character must be kept in view, though with somewhat different application, when the people to be helped are the sick, the old, and the children. Thus the sick, by convalescent homes, by the best nursing and the most skilled attention, should be as quickly as possible made fit for work.[2] [2] How does this harmonize with the practice of turning the lying-in mother out after fourteen days? The children should be absorbed into the normal life of the population, and helped to forget they are paupers.[3] [3] How does this harmonize with the practice of keeping them in barrack schools, in pauper villages? The aged should be left in their own homes, supported by some system of State pensions, unconsciously teaching lessons of patience to those who tend them, and giving of their painfully obtained experience lessons of hope or warning.[4] [4] How does this harmonize with the fact that there are thousands of people over sixty years of age in our State institutions? Has it ever occurred to the statistical inquirers to ascertain the death-rate of babies in relation to the absence of their grand-parents?