[816] Memorandum on Emigration at the cost of the poor rate, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 26th October 1889, pp. 884-5.
[817] In 1883-4 there were 296 persons emigrated; in 1885-6, 133 persons; between 1887 and 1898 the number fell from 301 to 12; it began to revive in 1903, when it was 66; in 1905 it was 317 (_see_ Thirteenth, Fifteenth, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-third and Thirty-fifth Annual Reports).
[818] Mr. Long in House of Commons, 2nd March 1905 (_Hansard_, vol. 142, p. 184).
Meanwhile, the emigration of Poor Law children to Canada continued, special applications for the sanction of the Central Authority having to be made in each case.[819] The question of the superior position in which such children were thus placed, compared with those of the lowest grade of independent labourer, does not appear to have been raised. The emigration and special supervision in Canada were the subject of repeated circulars and correspondence.[820] The numbers of orphan and deserted children thus removed to superior conditions rose, from 100 or 200 annually, to 398 in 1903 and 491 in 1905.[821]
[819] Memorandum on Emigration, in _Local Government Chronicle_, 26th October 1889, p. 885.
[820] Memorandum of April 1883; Thirteenth Annual Report, 1883-4, pp. xlvii.-xlix. 32-3; Fifteenth Annual Report, 1885-6, pp. xxxvi.-xxxvii. 61-5; Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, p. cxxxv.
[821] Thirty-fifth Annual Report, 1905-6, p. 587.
We note, without any explicit change of policy, a growing tendency to extend the sphere of relief on loan. It is in Mr. Corbett's Report of 1871 that we find a revival of the suggestion thrown out in 1840 that medical relief, in particular, might be given on loan; and even that it should be "generally granted by way of loan,"[822] without regard, it would seem, to the probability of its being recovered. This opinion of the inspectorate, though (as we gather) constantly pressed on boards of guardians, did not, in 1877, receive the explicit endorsement of the Central Authority. An influential proposal to make all relief (and especially all medical relief) recoverable as if given on loan was definitely negatived. "The policy of the existing law," it was declared, "is that the question whether or not relief shall be granted on loan, or, in other words, whether it shall be recoverable at a future time, is to be determined by a consideration of the actual circumstances existing at the time the relief is granted, and it would be at variance with that policy if every recipient of relief were to feel that after he again succeeded in obtaining employment any savings he might be able to put by would be liable for the repayment of the relief which he might have received."[823] This seems to be the latest declaration of policy. There is a particular difficulty in the way of granting medical relief on loan when the medical officer is paid by salary, which does not arise when he is paid by fee--namely, that of fixing the amount to be recovered. The Central Authority suggested that the difficulty might perhaps be met by paying him partly by fee and partly by salary, but it expressed no decided views as to either the practicability or the expediency of such a course.[824]