"the relief of the impotent and the setting of the able-bodied to work"—a programme covering the whole field of the relief of poverty—had broken down. And that not because there had been parsimony of expenditure—the increase of the rates precludes such a suggestion—but because its authors had left out of consideration the elementary law that human nature, like everything in the physical world, follows the line of least resistance, and that so long as the State offers, or appears to offer, the means of subsistence upon easy terms, a large majority of the poorer population will shape their lives accordingly.
In 1834 came the celebrated Report of the Commissioners, a document doubtless familiar to every Guardian here. They, like earlier writers, ascribe the evil directly to demoralisation caused by the Poor Law, and they lay down two fundamental principles as essential to the administration of public relief—the first, that it should be limited to the relief of destitution, such destitution to be tested by the willingness to accept institutional relief; the second, that the position of the pauper should be "less eligible" than that of the poor workman who supports himself, and has to contribute to the rates and taxes. Outside these limits the relief of the poor was to be left to voluntary charity. After the agitation against the new Poor Law, a long-continued and violent one, had subsided, for the next forty years there was a period of quietude. Outdoor relief to the able-bodied had been abolished, subject to certain limitations, and in forty years the workhouses were practically clear of able-bodied men. In the sixties there was fresh reaction against strict administration, and a huge increase of outdoor relief: certain Boards of Guardians in East London and elsewhere were besieged by threatening crowds of applicants, and sat under police protection. There was an enormous increase both in pauperism and expenditure. Once more the public became alarmed, and the Poor Law Board issued the well-known Memorandum of 1869, by which the respective functions of public and
