"the niggerly [sic] manner in which outdoor relief is granted." Generally speaking, that is the line taken by the great majority of addresses which deal specifically with any question of administration, and it may be added that addresses of the same nature have done duty at Poor Law elections for many generations. No one apparently stops to ask why it is that though outdoor relief has of late years been largely on the increase in all but an infinitesimal number of unions, expenditure upon "bricks and mortar" has tended to increase even faster. No one has asked why it is that the largest increase of indoor expenditure has taken place precisely in those unions which have expended most upon outdoor relief, or why it is that more "homes are broken up" in outdoor unions than in indoor ones. Yet as to the facts there can be no doubt. Meanwhile the advocacy of outdoor relief is, and always must be, popular, and is of course especially welcome to those associations which control the elections, and which themselves largely depend for their existence upon popularity. Here and there we find an address of a different quality. One from Paddington contains a quotation from an Annual Report of the Local Government Board to the effect that "outdoor relief has never sensibly reduced indoor relief." A very outspoken one from St Pancras defines the object of the Poor Law as being "the diminution of the curse of pauperism, and the raising of the condition of the poor." The writer failed to be elected. One from Shoreditch speaks of the "difficult and complicated question of outdoor relief," one or two more of the necessity of "discrimination," but they are very guarded in their utterances, and, speaking generally, the public is not likely to derive much enlightenment upon Poor Law questions from the addresses of
