provide "whatever treatment may seem most appropriate in each case," and the only check upon their action will be the "Registrar," whose duty it will be to register public relief, to sanction grants of home aliment, and recover relief from those able to pay "upon such terms as Parliament may decide."
Its Promises.
The Minority promise great results from their scheme. Overlapping is to be stopped, destitution prevented in its earlier stages and eventually abolished altogether. "We may be unduly hopeful," they say, "but after the most careful consideration and a great deal of consultation with practical administrators on all sides of the question, we make bold to say that it can be done. We can abolish destitution." It would be interesting to learn the names and qualifications of those "practical administrators "who would endorse this statement. The Association of Poor Law Unions, which is the leading body of practical expert opinion upon the subject, has already expressed an opinion adverse to the Report. At the last Central Poor Law Conference, according to the most friendly estimate, only thirty hands were held up in its favour, though some five hundred delegates were present.
This is not the first time in history that we have been promised the abolition of poverty through the Poor Law. Doubtless the authors of the Act of Elizabeth thought that they had solved the problem when they provided for the "relief of the impotent and the setting of the able-bodied on work." Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many of the most eminent thinkers, amongst whom John Locke was the most conspicuous, devised scheme after scheme for this very purpose. Sir F. Eden, writing at the close of the eighteenth century,
