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Farm Labourers, their Friendly Societies, 
applicants belonging to approved friendly societies where the 
sickness pay is in their opinion insufficient. 
' ' (2) The refusal of relief, other than the house, to applicants 
being members of sharing-out or other clubs not deserving of 
confidence. 
(3) Strict treatment of able-bodied male paupers of indifferent 
or bad character ; thus making a difference between them and 
able-bodied paupers whose want resulted from their misfortune 
and not from their fault. 
(4) That able-bodied married paupers of the latter class, and 
aged and infirm married paupers, be allowed to live in conformity 
with the provision that husband and wife shall dwell together till 
death them do part. 
(5) All occupiers of houses to pay rates on the rateable 
value. No composition in lieu thereof to be permitted. 
There was a fair probability of indirectly gaining the last- 
named alteration in the extension of the franchise ; but the session 
of 1869 witnessed an alteration which, in its bearing on the 
occupiers of small tenements, tends to perpetuate the pernicious 
view commonly taken by them of the poor-rate, and imposition 
by farming their rates. An enlargement of the powers of the 
Registrar of Friendly Societies, and certain alterations in the law 
relating to friendly societies, are needed, in order to secure 
the annual audit of accounts, and the periodical valuation of 
the societies. Such information should then be tabulated 
in the Registrar's reports, and thus be available to the 
guardians. But they would need no help from the Registrar 
in dealing with applicants belonging to uncertified farm 
labourers' benefit clubs of the common type until their mana- 
gers began to improve them. 
Such, then, is the nature of the work, so far as the Poor 
Law is concerned, and the alterations which appear to be neces- 
sary if the degradation of our rural poor is to be arrested, and 
their natural efforts for independence to be stimulated and de- 
veloped. We would destroy or alter nothing in the Poor Law, 
or its administration, which is good and serviceable, but would 
amend it in those points in which it is working mischief to the 
labouring classes and loss and injury to the community. 
The second part of this reform, which should on no account 
be postponed till the regulations for poor-relief are amended, is 
that which would develope and consolidate a system as com- 
plete and distinct in itself as that of the Poor Law, of the 
insurances of the wage-paid classes who dwell within the verge 
of pauperism. 
While, on the one hand, labourers, whether agricultural, 
mining, or manufacturing, should be discouraged as much as 
