most important practical question in the treatment of a case is usually whether indoor or outdoor relief is to be offered. On the other hand, he will plainly have discretion as to the amount of outdoor relief which is to be granted. When two or three of the new authorities have recommended overlapping out-relief for the same family, he will have the power to see that it is "neither too much nor too little." But his general function will apparently be not so much to determine whether out-relief is to be granted, but as to its amount. The practical granting of out-relief will therefore apparently still remain with the "many-headed" body. But even if that is not so, it is evidently the intention of the Minority that out-relief should be granted in all cases where it is reasonably possible, and to many which are now outside the scope of the Poor Law altogether. Those who believe that the Minority wish to restrict out-relief by the intervention of the Registrar, will find themselves disappointed.
The second principal function of the Registrar is to be the recovery of relief from "those able to pay." Here again the ability to pay is to be determined by future legislation, based presumably upon some such consideration as a "poverty line," the course recently roughly adopted by the London County Council with regard to the feeding of school children. It is hardly necessary to point out the extreme practical difficulty of any such enactment. The "poverty line" is an abstraction about which it is next to impossible to generalise. If it is to be based upon earnings, not an agricultural labourer in the country would be assessable by the Registrar. All could claim exemption. We can easily imagine the debates in the House of Commons when such a subject was discussed. The Minority point, apparently in support of their proposals, to the fact that already a certain amount is recovered from
