Report will continue to be read and studied by students of Poor Laws in all countries. However that may be, we have now at least arrived at this—that fourteen out of eighteen Commissioners appointed on account of their special fitness for this inquiry have once again endorsed the wisdom of the principles laid down by their predecessors in the great inquiry of 1834. "Poor Law administration," they say, "moves in cycles determined in part by varying prosperity and in part by the coming of a new generation which lacks the experience of its predecessors and has ideas of its own. Difficulties recur; old abuses and old evils which were thought to have been buried reassert themselves; the scale of needs and resources is greater, but the problems are fundamentally the same" (Report, Part IV., 238).
