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tion. Of course poor people will apply for what they believe to be their share of a fund which is in their eyes inexhaustible and specially intended for them; would anyone refrain from increasing his income if he could do so simply by the asking? But soon the "amplest charity," the most "free and easy" poor law, is inundated and overwhelmed. It has been so in Poplar, West Ham, and other Unions in and about London. It was so again and again in France in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods, when they tried to put into practice the teaching of Rousseau. Sooner or later the reaction comes, the public purse is exhausted, and poor people are left to face the world robbed of their only real resources, namely, those that lie in themselves. Seventy years ago practically the whole population was in the clutches of the Poor Law. Then came the great struggle of 1834, and practical emancipation. Now we are again upon the top of a reaction. Since 1900 the official figures of pauperism have been steadily on the upgrade, and we have now a huge volume of State relief which is outside the Poor Law altogether. Of course the official figures do not measure exactly the number of those who have acquired the pauper spirit. Exceptional crises may from time to time swell the figures with those who are far from being paupers. At all times there are included in them some who cannot rightly be regarded as such. But political economy deals with tendencies, and from that point of view the official figures may fairly be taken as a test. When we find two Unions externally identical, of which the one has double the pauperism of the other, we know that the process of pauperisation has set in, and that large numbers of the poor have been tempted to give up the struggle for life and to surrender their independence. We know also that calamity over-