Society ought to secure that pain attaches to anti-social, and pleasure to social conduct.

This may be done by making every man's livelihood and that of his children normally dependent upon his own exertions, by separating those destitute persons who cannot do work useful to the community from those who can, and by presenting these last with the alternative of voluntary effort or painful restriction.

This leads to 'a principle which we find universally admitted, even by those whose practice is at variance with it, that the situation [of the pauper] on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.'[46] The _a priori_ argument is admirably illustrated by instances, reported by the sub-commissioners or given in evidence before the Commission, indicating that labouring men will not exert themselves unless they are offered the alternative of starvation or rigorous confinement, though no attempt is made to estimate the proportion of the working population of England whose character and conduct is represented by each instance.
[46] _First Report of the Poor Law Commission_, 1834 (reprinted 1894), p.

187.
This _a priori_ deduction, illustrated, but not proved by particular instances, is throughout so clear and so easily apprehended by the ordinary man that the revolutionary Bill of 1834, which affected all sorts of vested interests, passed the House of Commons by a majority of four to one and the House of Lords by a majority of six to one.
The Poor Law Commission of 1905, on the other hand, though it contains many members trained in the traditions of 1834, is being driven, by the mere necessity of dealing with the mass of varied evidence before it, onto new lines.

Instead of assuming half consciously that human energy is dependent solely on the working of the human will in the presence of the ideas of pleasure and pain, the Commissioners are forced to tabulate and consider innumerable quantitative observations relating to the very many factors affecting the will of paupers and possible paupers.