“We cannot,” says the Minority Report,[8] “too emphatically express our disagreement with those who accept this [the attendance of children reared in workhouses at public elementary schools] as any excuse for retaining children in the workhouse at all.... We paid special attention to this point of the provision for children on our visits to workhouses, large and small, in town and country, in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. We saw hardly any workhouse or poorhouse in which the accommodation for children was at all satisfactory. We unhesitatingly agree with the Inspector of the Local Government Board, who gave it to us as his opinion that ‘no serious argument in defence of the workhouse system is possible. The person who would urge that the atmosphere and associations of a workhouse are a fit up-bringing for a child merely proves his incapacity to express an intelligent opinion upon the matter.’” [8] Minority Report, pp. 802, 803. “We are strongly of opinion,” says the Majority Report,[9] “that effective steps should be taken to secure that the maintenance of children in the workhouse be no longer recognized as a legitimate way of dealing with them.” [9] Majority Report, p. 187. This evil is of long standing; for a dozen years the pressing necessity for the removal from such surroundings of these State-dependent children has been represented to successive Presidents of the Local Government Board, and to Boards of Guardians, and the saddest fact of all is that, at the date of the latest Local Government Board Return, 24,175 children (more than one-third of the total number who are entirely maintained out of the rates) are still being reared in this unsuitable environment, actually a larger number than in any preceding year since 1899. To all those gentlemen who have read the Royal Commissioners’ Report I must apologize for quoting it so largely. Those who have not read it will recognize something of the extreme interest of its contents and take it for their winter’s reading. But to return again to the Widows and Children on out relief. The Majority Report says:-- “The Guardians give relief without knowing whether the recipients can manage on it; they go on giving it without knowing how they are managing on it.” “In short, there is a widespread system of trying to compensate for inadequacy of knowledge by inadequacy of relief.” This is a severe condemnation both of the Guardians and the Local Government Board, whose inspectors we know had been long aware of the facts. Moved by the outcry caused by the publication of these revelations, a circular on the “Administration of Outdoor Relief” was issued by the Central Authority last March to the Boards of Guardians, calling on them for greater discrimination in the selection of cases and the adoption of uniform principles.