[848] Par. 420 of Part IV.; and pars. 92, 99-100 and 148a of Part IX. of Majority Report. To this principle of placing all forms of public assistance under a general Public Assistance Authority (and thus classing all the recipients as paupers) the Majority make a remarkable exception. They acquiesce, so far as England and Wales are concerned, in the proposed taking out of the Poor Law of all the various grades of the Mentally Defective—the lunatics, the idiots, the feeble-minded, and the chronically inebriate—and the treatment of this great class, amounting to 20 per cent of the present pauper host, not in respect of their destitution, but, whatever their pecuniary circumstances, in respect of their mental defect, by an authority specialising on that branch of administration.
[849] Par. 143 of Part IV. of Majority Report.
[850] "The Majority Report," by Professor Bernard Bosanquet (Sociological Review, April 1909).
[851] Ibid.
[852] The Minority Commissioners took up the discussion on this fundamental point in the Minority Report for Scotland (Cd. 4922); and we give in an appendix to the present volume (Appendix B) the detailed answer there afforded to Professor Bosanquet's argument.
[853] "It had been suggested," explained one of the signatories of the Majority Report, "that the Majority Report was a C.O.S. report from beginning to end.... The C.O.S. might be proud to feel that they had set their mark upon that report.... The idea was that, before the Public Assistance Authority undertook the cases, they should make themselves perfectly certain that charity was incapable of dealing with them, and that charity should always have the first attempt at a remedy, that charity should act as a sieve through which the cases should pass before they came to the Public Authority" (Lecture by the Rev. L. R. Phelps at Norwich, Eastern Daily Press, 30th June 1909).
[854] Majority Report, Part VII. par. 198, 236.
[855] Ibid. par. 613 of Part VI.
[856] Ibid. par. 623 of Part VI.
[857] That this interpretation is not unwarranted is shown by the explanation given by one of the signatories of the Majority Report. "Charity should be properly organised to deal with these cases.... This was the position of the Majority Report.... Their motto should not be 'Help the deserving,' but 'Help the hopeful cases,' and leave State action for that section of the community which needed the bridle, the curb, and the spurs to be disciplined" (Lecture by the Rev. L. R. Phelps at Sheffield, Sheffield Independent, 15th December 1909).