The vast sum of money--this £20,000,000 a year--which is spent misses to a large extent its object to give relief, and, further than this, causes widespread demoralization. The sick who have overcome their shrinking to face the relieving officer to ask for a medical officer, are found readily treading the same path to ask for other relief. The workhouses--one of which, lately built, has cost £126,612, or £286 a bed--“are,” we read, “largely responsible for the considerable increase of indoor pauperism,” and evidence is given “that life in a workhouse deteriorates mentally, morally, and physically the habitual inmates”. It must be so, indeed, when young girls are put “to sleep with women admitted by the master to be frequently of bad character”. Out relief has been the battlefield of rival schools of administrators, and the Commissioners find in the system “of trying to compensate for inadequacy of knowledge by inadequacy of relief” two obvious points: “First, that when the applicants are honest in their statements they must often suffer great privations; and, second, that when they are dishonest, relief must often be given quite unnecessarily”. Evidence, too, is given of instances where out relief is being applied to subsidize dirt, disease and immorality, justifying the conclusion that it is “a very potent influence in perpetuating pauperism and propagating disease”. When the Commissioners have admitted that much has been done by wise Boards of Guardians in providing infirmaries for the sick which are as good as hospitals, and in administering out relief with sympathy and discrimination, the conclusion must still remain that the present system does not relieve the necessities of the poor, while it tends to spread demoralization. It fails under the suggested test. The Commissioners’ proposed reforms must be tried by the same tests. Their proposals include (1) the constitution of a new authority, and (2) the principles on which that authority is to act. The principles--keeping in mind for the moment the class of “the unable”--recommended by the Majority and Minority are practically identical. In the words of the Majority:-- 1. The treatment of the poor who apply for public assistance should be adapted to the needs of the individual, and if constitutional should be governed by classification. 2. The system of public assistance thus established should include processes of help which would be preventive, curative and restorative. 3. Every effort should be made to foster the instincts of independence and self-maintenance amongst those assisted. The same principles appear when the Minority Report urges the (1) “paramount importance of subordinating mere relief to the specialized treatment of each separate class, with the object of preventing or curing its distress”.