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When the Board are disposing of the out-relief cases, it is by this knowledge the Board are guided.

He must find money somehow; the parish will not keep him on out-relief if he has no work; the rate-collector calls at his door; his children must go to school decently clad with pennies in each little hand.

In many villages the expenditure in out-relief—chiefly in orders upon village shops for flour, clothes, butter, cheese, &c.—amounted to from L2 to L3 per head of the population, that is, a village with a population of a thousand persons would expend L2,600 a year in "relieving" pauperism.

The manner of giving out-relief was pretty much of a piece with that in the Workhouse, though had it been administered by efficient and independent officers it would have been both humane and sensible, as based upon the principle of helping those who helped themselves.

The object of out-relief seems to have been to help all sorts of people in all sorts of ways to tide over a temporary difficulty, but unfortunately these temporary difficulties multiplied so fast on the hands of the parish Overseer as to become chronic, and that officer became the father of the parish, and the dispenser of all sorts of things from out of the parish cupboard.