Moreover, it is an estimate which includes all classes.
The proportion, taking the working-classes alone, must be even higher.
Turning from pauper deaths to pauper lives, the condition of the poor, though improved, is far from satisfactory.

The agricultural labourer in many parts of England still looks to the poorhouse as a natural and necessary asylum for old age.

Even the diminution effected in outdoor relief is not evidence of a corresponding decrease in the pressure of want.

The diminution is chiefly due to increased strictness in the application of the Poor Law, a policy which in a few cases such as Whitechapel, Stepney, St.George-in-the-East, has succeeded in the practical extermination of the outdoor pauper.

This is doubtless a wise policy, but it supplies no evidence of decrease in poverty.