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demand for them. It has been found by careful enquiry that a very small number of these children ever return to the workhouse, and hardly any who have had time to experience the effect of the training, so carefully bestowed. With this practical experience before his eyes, and with a lively knowledge of certain facts existing under the old Poor Law, when relations, and often mothers themselves, were paid for taking care of their own children, the Chairman, who for nearly forty years successfully worked this Union, had formed a strong opinion adverse to the effect of such an experiment in this country as the boarding-out system which has lately been sanctioned by the Poor Law Board.
Upon the same grounds, namely, to discourage that sort of communistic dependence too often promoted by the present administration of the Poor Law, the Chairman was strongly opposed to the introducing of the Compound Householder Act into his Union, namely, the creation of a class of persons unconscious of rates. When Tom Smith has to pay for his neighbour, Jack Robinson, he will see that he does not too easily come on the rates, but when Smith has nothing to pay, he is not so careful; and to this insidious cause may be often traced the prevalence of actual pauperism; in the Union above quoted, the only district where pauperism appears above the average being where the Small Tenements Act is in force. Perhaps it may some day be made clear that those who, for political or other reasons, made this Act universal in towns, exhibited culpable ignorance of a fruitful source of pauperism, and have aggravated, not a little, the difficulties of those engaged in dealing with the matter.
To the personal energy which made the school a model to Poor Law inspectors, was in great part the whole success of this administration due. A chairman of a union who will find opportunities for constant personal communication with the master, schoolmaster, and other officials, will strengthen both his own and their hands, and a guardian who will inquire minutely of the inmates of a workhouse how they came there (generally flagrant improvidence) will learn some of the most fertile local causes of pauperism. An inquiry as to how those are living who have left the workhouse, and who have been refused out-relief, will often lead to still further disclosures; but this, it should be observed, is impossible in any very large area of management, and difficult in any but a very moderate one. Therefore the present policy of the Poor Law Board in enlarging areas, some already unmanageable by their bulk and thereby destroying the possibility of personal supervision, is not the way best calculated to reduce pauperism.
But this personal supervision and care were still more shown in the district where the Chairman himself resided. Here in two Poor Law parishes, comprising a population of about 2500 souls, the pauperism amounted to only ½ per cent., almost all being in-door relief. While in one of those parishes, containing 300 souls, entirely owned by the Chairman, the pauperism amounted to some fraction—virtually nil. Thus by no spasmodic or accidental process, but by
