The application to the children of what we have called the "Principle of Curative Treatment" is of older date than its application to the sick--dating, indeed, from E. Carleton Tufnell's Report of 1841. In all the development from the earliest "district school" to the most up-to-date "cottage home," the whole policy of the Central Authority has been to provide the most efficient education for the child, so that it shall be positively more able to cope with the battle of life and less likely to fall again into the ranks of pauperism than the child of the lowest grade of independent labourer. In the Poor Law institutions for children sanctioned in recent years, the Principle of Greater Eligibility has been carried so far as to result in the provision, for the pauper child, of physical training, mental education, and prolonged supervisory care, extending over more years of life, and costing more per head per annum, than the corresponding provision usually made for children even of the lower middle class. In the same way, the Central Authority sanctions, even if it does not overtly encourage, the bestowal of elaborate and costly care and supervision in the launching into life of some sections of Poor Law children--going even so far as occasionally to sanction premiums, residential homes, or a "rate in aid" of their insufficient earnings as apprentices in skilled trades. But though the Principle of Curative Treatment has been carried to a high pitch in respect of some sections of the child pauper population, it has been scarcely at all applied to other sections. It is, indeed, not too much to say that, with regard to the children on outdoor relief, the contrary Principle of Less Eligibility is still the governing policy. An investigation into their condition might show that a large proportion of them, upon the relief afforded, are more likely to fall into disease, vice or pauperism than the average child of the lowest grade of independent labourer. For these children, the policy of the Central Authority does not include either supervision or systematic medical inspection, either the protection of the child's leisure from industrial work or even any minimum provision for its maintenance, let alone any selection of a suitable skilled occupation for it or any subsidised apprenticeship. All that the Central Authority does for these 170,000 pauper children is to ask that they should be vaccinated and should be in regular attendance at a public elementary school--advantages which they share with the non-pauper children.