(_a_) _The Babies._--Sir John Simon, Chief Medical Officer of the Local Government Board, wrote forcibly on the subject more than a generation past. Dr. Fuller’s Report was made years ago. Again and again reform has been urged by Poor Law Inspectors and workhouse officials, who have asked for additional powers to obtain information or classification or detention. What has the Local Government Board done? The following extract from the Minority Report can be the reply:-- “Alike in the prevention of the continued procreation of the feeble-minded, in the rescue of girl-mothers from a life of sexual immorality, and in the reduction of infantile mortality in respectable but necessitous families, the destitution authorities, in spite of their great expenditure, are to-day effecting no useful results. With regard to the two first of these problems, at any rate, the activities of the Boards of Guardians are, in our judgment, actually intensifying the evil. If the State had desired to maximize both feeble-minded procreation, and birth out of wedlock, there could not have been suggested a more apt device than the provision, throughout the country, of general mixed workhouses, organized as they are now to serve as unconditional maternity hospitals.... While thus encouraging ... these evils they are doing little to arrest the appalling preventible mortality that prevails among the infants of the poor.” (_b_) _The Children in the Workhouses._--“So long ago as 1841 the Poor-Law Commissioners pointed out forcibly the evils connected with the maintenance of children in workhouses.” In 1896 the Departmental Committee, of which Mr. Mundella was chairman, and on which I had the honour of sitting, brought before the public the opinion of inspectors, guardians, officials, educationists and child-lovers, all unanimous in condemning this system. “In the workhouse the children meet with crime and pauperism from day to day.” “They are in the hands of adult paupers for their cleanliness, and the whole thing is extremely bad.” “The able-bodied paupers with whom they associate are a very bad class, almost verging on criminal, if not quite,” is some of the evidence quoted in the Report, and the Committee unanimously signed the recommendation “that no children be allowed to enter the workhouse,” and now, thirteen years afterwards, the same conditions prevail. The Majority Report thus describes cases of children in workhouses:--