Note 663 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

"The dispensary system should be regarded, in common with every improved form of out-relief, not as a final object of Poor Law administration, but merely as a means of administering with greater efficiency that legal relief which, as I have attempted to show elsewhere, is most safely and effectually given in the form of indoor relief. It would, of course, be idle, and worse than idle, to stifle all attempts to reform the administration of out-relief, on the ground that it is desirable, and may, at some remote period, be possible to abolish, or at least greatly to curtail it; and no reform of the practice of relief was probably more urgently needed, or has proved more effectual, than that now under consideration. It must not, however, be forgotten that side by side with Poor Law dispensaries, has grown up, also under the sanction of the Metropolitan Poor Act, a system ... which by encouraging and affording special facilities for the grant of indoor relief to sick paupers, must, if the policy of the Act be unflinchingly carried out, eventually tend ... to the gradual abolition of out-relief to the sick, other than those incapable of removal from their homes. If this be so, Poor Law dispensaries ... must ultimately be found to have had for the most part a merely temporary place in the system of relief in London.... The character of permanence should not be hastily affixed to the system which they represent" (Mr. Longley's Report on Indoor Relief in the Metropolis, in Fourth Annual Report, 1874-5, pp. 41-42). In spite of this criticism, the Central Authority continued to sanction Poor Law dispensaries. Elaborate institutions on the London plan were established in other unions under the general powers of the Act of 1834; see, for instance, the Special Order of 9th June 1873, to Portsea Island Union; those of 4th March and 28th August 1880, to Birmingham; those of 30th November 1885, and 9th January 1895, to Plymouth.