I. “The unable” include the sick, the old, the children and infirm, and--although on this matter the Local Government Board gave uncertain guidance--widows with children. The present system, starting from the principle laid down in 1834, aims at deterring people from application by a barbed-wire fence of regulations. The sick can only have a doctor after inquiry by the relieving officer. The old and infirm are herded in a general workhouse together with people whose contact often wounds their self-respect. The children are isolated from other children, and treated as a class apart. Widows with children can only get means of maintenance by applying at the relief table in company with the degraded, by enduring the close inquisition of the relieving officer, and then by attendance at the Board of Guardians, where, standing in the middle of the room, they have to face their gaze, answer their questions, and at the end be grateful for a pittance of relief. This system does not, in the first place, relieve the necessities of the poor. Many of the sick defer their application till their condition becomes serious, or they set themselves to beg for hospital letters. Many of the old and infirm, rather than submit to the iniquities of the workhouse, live a life of semi-starvation. Few of the widows who receive a few shillings a week for the maintenance of their families, are able unaided to look after their children and give them the necessary care and food. “A few Boards,” says the Minority Report, “restrict to the uttermost the grant of out relief to widows with children; many refuse it to the widow with only one child or with only two children, however young these may be; others grant only the quite inadequate sum of 1s. or 1s. 6d. a week per child, and nothing for the mother. Very few Guardians face the problem of how the widow’s children ... can under these circumstances be properly reared.... In at least 100,000 cases their children are growing up stunted, under-nourished, and to a large extent neglected, because the mother is so hard driven that she cannot properly attend to them. The irony of the situation appears in the fact that if the mother thereupon dies the children will probably be ‘boarded out’ with a payment of 4s. or 5s. per week each, or three or four times as much as the Guardians paid for them before, or else be taken into the Poor Law school or cottage homes at a cost of 12s. to 21s. per week each.”