The break-up of the poor law : being part one of the minority report of the Poor Law Commission / edited, with Introduction, by Sidney & Beatrice Webb.

  • Great Britain. Poor Law Commission.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The break-up of the poor law : being part one of the minority report of the Poor Law Commission / edited, with Introduction, by Sidney & Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    of the Local Government Board for England and Wales— a large amount of unnecessary expenditure^' 47. That the continued detention in the General Mixed Workhouses of England, Wales and Ireland, and, to a lesser degree, those of Scotland, of no fewer than 60,000 Mentally Defective persons, including not a few children, without education or ameliorative treatment, and herded indiscriminately with the sane, amounts to a public scandal. 48. That the practice of Ireland, where the inmates of the County Lunatic Asylums are wholly unconnected with the Poor Law, and are not stigmatised as paupers, should be adopted for Great Britain. 49. That we concur with the Vice-Regal Commission on Poor Law Eeform in Ireland in thinking that all persons of unsound mind, whatever their mental state, and whatever their age, should be everywhere wholly removed from the Workhouses. 50. That, in the words of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, it is ''the mental condition of these persons, and neither their poverty nor their crime, that is the real ground of their claim for help from the State. 51. That we, accordingly, concur with that Commission in the view that all grades of the Mentally Defective (including the feeble-minded, the epileptics, the inebriates, the imbeciles, the lunatics and the idiots) should, at all ages, be wholly withdrawn from the charge of the Destitu- tion Authorities, and from pauperism, as well as from the Local Education Authorities, and that the entire respon- sibility for their discovery, certification and appropriate treatment (whether institutional or domiciliary) should be entrusted in England, Wales and Ireland, to the County and County Borough Councils, acting by statutory Com- mittees for the Mentally Defective, in which the present Asylums Committees would be merged, and in Scotland to the County Councils and principal Town Councils, from which the District Boards of Lunacy are (with the excep- tion of six towns) selected. 52. That the whole duty of supervision and control of