be to traverse the whole ground of this famous report, but for my own part I only want to call attention to an institution typical of all the faults and errors of the Poor Law--the workhouse. For if the rich have by their laws made a mess of the alehouse, what about the other public-house--the workhouse? When you have no money to enable you to take your ease at your inn the only other hostelry open for you and your wife and children is the Poor House. If there is one subject that has a more confused melancholy legal history than another it is the story of the workhouse. No doubt much has been done and something is doing, but it is difficult to see the real metal of the reformer's work for the great heaps of Poor Law dirt that our forefathers have left for us to clear away. For years the great English General Mixed Workhouse has been looking for trouble. It has not a friend even in the Local Government Board Office, and it has been condemned by all right-minded men and women time out of mind as an abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Yet there it is. A blockhouse, invented, built, and governed by blockheads, or at least beings with wooden blocks instead of human hearts. It is mournful to read the Poor Law history of the last eighty years and to learn how little we have done to dry the tears of the widows and orphans who become, through folly, misfortune, or ill-regulated industry, the wards of the State. And to understand how such an institution came into our midst, it is necessary to look back a bit upon the natural history of our Poor Law. Whatever our failings may be as practical statesmen capable of translating philanthropic theory into practical statutory right action, no one can deny we are a great people for ideals. And the ideal of our Poor Law has from earliest days been excellent. Coke in his Institutes tells us that it was ordained by Kings before the Conquest that the poor should be sustained by parsons, rectors, and parishioners, "so that no one should die from lack of sustenance." That was, and still is, the ideal. No citizen is to die from lack of sustenance, and yet surely since the Conquest, and even recently in our own time, some perverse person has escaped the careful eyes of the parsons, rectors, and parishioners, and crept away to an obscure corner there to die of hunger against the ordinance of Kings in that case made and provided. Coke got this phrase from Andrew Horn, the author or editor of that excellent treatise "La Somme appelle Mirroir des Justices," which he must have compiled somewhere before 1328, though it was first printed in 1624. Horn's "Mirror of Justices," is not, I believe, regarded with great reverence by the learned as a law-book, but Coke enjoyed it and quoted it with approval, and whether or not some of its phrases were ever sound law I dare not express an opinion, but I will vouch for the excellence of Andrew's sympathies.