ANTI-PAUPERISM 
771 
children and persons capable of labour, but using no daily AD jm 
trade, and in the necessary relief of the impotent, is applied —— 
to purposes opposed to the letter, and still more to the spirit eective 
control; 
of that Law, and destructive to the morals of the most and 
numerous class, and to the welfare of all.” 
Considerable changes were needed to give effect, under 
altered circumstances, to the aims which the Elizabethan 
legislators had had in view. The Commissioners of 1832 thous gid 
advocated the introduction of one type of administrative a antral 
v - QU ly 
machinery throughout the country generally? and advised 
the appointment of a Poor-law Commission, which might be 
a permanent authority in all matters of administration, and 
which might use its influence to bring up the practice of 
the local functionaries in every part of the country to 
a satisfactory level’, There was need for the reintroduction 
of a central authority to exercise a general supervision, as 
the Council had done in Elizabethan times. 
They also proposed to adopt the safe course of being 
guided by actual experience in regard to the granting of 
assistance, and laid down the principle “that those modes of pi 
oo. . . . * . uce a 
administering relief, which have been tried wholly or partially, sester 
. . a lic. 
and have produced beneficial results in some districts be 22% 
introduced with modifications according to local circum- 
stances, and carried into complete execution in all%” The first 
recommendation which they made was that « of abolishing all 
relief to able-bodied persons or their families except in well 
regulated workhouses.” The re-institution of a workhouse 
best’, which had been abandoned in 1782 and 1795, was the 
corner-stone of the new policy®; but in order that this position 
might be secured, it was necessary that proper management 
1 Reports, 1834, xxva. p. 8. 
2 On the whole they recommended the system which was in vogue in the 
Gilbert incorporations as a model for general adoption. 
8 Reports, 1834, XxvIL 167.  ¢ Jp. 1884, xxviL. p. 146.  & See above, 719n. 8. 
8 It is extraordinary to see how many years passed, after the House of Commons 
was convinced of the necessity of recasting the system, before the change was 
actually carried out. The Report of the Commons Committee in 1759 advocates 
a scheme which is similar in many features to that actually adopted (C. J. xxv. 
599) ; it appears to have been the basis of Mr Gilbert's first bill which passed the 
House of Commons in 1765 (C. J. xxx. 164) and was read a second time in the 
House of Lords (ZL. J. xxx1. 107) but never became law (Parl. Hist. xvi. 544 and 
XXII. S01).