the candidates, and so far as these are concerned the "education" of the electorate does not appear likely to progress apace.
There are also some addresses of an extremist kind. The increasing intervention of the labour party in local elections has been already mentioned. In at least two unions they have an official programme and manifesto containing a long list of proposed "reforms," many of which would be considered outside the province of the Poor Law. Judging from that programme, it would appear that they look to the Poor Law for the solution of the problem of poverty, and we have the ominous spectacle of a "labour" party clamouring for relief from the rates.
But there are other extremists besides those of the labour party. It is remarkable that in those unions in which outdoor relief has been carried to its greatest lengths the cry for its extension is the most persistent. In Camberwell, for instance, the out-relief expenditure is some,£30,000 a year, and yet we find the following in one of the addresses from that union:—
"The people are being driven into the workhouses at enormous cost, where outdoor relief at one quarter the cost is being viciously refused … the money is infamously dragged from the poor and lavishly squandered upon the rich. One big butcher got a contract for nearly,£8000 [sic] of meat, for one six months. If outdoor relief were intelligently given, thousands of aged workhouse inmates could live at home with their grown-up sons and daughters, and the little butchers would sell more meat, and we should all be paying less rates, and everybody would benefit." This sounds like an echo from some far-off fiscal platform. Another address from the same union also advocates more outdoor relief: "habitual pauperism," it
