Chadwick's advocasy of positive Government action was logically combined with a rejection of the orthodox economic theories of the day. When he began his Poor Law investigation economic science was a remote, deductive, Ricardian structure. It proceeded from premiss to conclusion with the inevitable progress of a geometrical proof. He abandoned this method, and found himself abandoning the principles and the deductions from them. He told at a meeting of Political Economy Club that there were two schools of economists: the hypothesists, who reasoned deductively from unverified or imperfectly verified hypotheses which they called principles; and the school of facts, who preferred to make inductions from the facts, incomplete though these might be (Population Question, Two schools of political economy: the geometrical reasoners and the reasoners from facts, MS c. June 1845). Unattractive and labourious as the latter was, it was the method he favoured. The problem of the geometrical reasoning was that "we are apt to imagine and to use conjunctions of circumstances which never do occur as assumed and from them to deduce consequences which never do happen as deduced, and never will so happen". The theorist might aggravate human misery by deducing it upon hypothesis to be irremoval. The result is to "mischievously misdirect human attention: to excite false alarms, to give extreme plan". He found a methodological difference between schools of political economy produce a significant effect upon policy action.

Lagislation must be founded on an ample induction, that is, an inquiry safeguarded as in a scientific investigation by every security for the attainment of objective truth. Legislation is "an affair of observation and calculation"(Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, C.K.Ogden ed., 10, 102). "You have been dependent upon what others bring before you, The merit of my procedure for investigation is , that I have the least of such dependence. I do not only the work of an attorney but the work of an attorney's clerk. I have gone to see the places myself[...]: and I have cross-examined the witnesses there on the spot"(EC to Lord Bramwell, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Sewage Dischaege 1884-5, 3 March 1885). The procedure he favoured was that of an open inquiry by commission of experts, circulating detailed questionnaires and concluding local inquiries by itinerant investigators. He thought it to produce a body of tested knowledge, based on experiment, accurate observation, and verifiable evidence. The tested knowkedge seemed to survive any unstable context of political muddling-through.

His favourite method in the descriptive portions of his report was to present his his facts in the words of his informants, knitting their accounts together with a few remarks of explanation and comment. He let them speak for themselves. Everybody has his/her story, facts and experiences. The findings of investigation were most of them new to himself as well as his colleagues. But to the hypothesists the whole inquiry appeared superflous, since it was obvious that the cause of pauperism was the growth of population beyond the means for its support. A priori law of population led them to deduce that labour market was saturated, and the paupers had been squeezed out by the competition of their fellow workers. The remedies deduced from the law of population seemed to be very narrow in its sight. It seemed to be incompatible with the facts and reality of society. Look at the facts and observe that they in no way bear out this grim picture of a population pressing right up to the margin of subsistence, and in their struggles pushing the less fortunate over that margin into starvation and misery. From talks with aged labourers in the country parishes he learned that within the span of their experience their conditions had greatly improved. Their real wages had risen and were still rising, and their life expectation was longer now than ever before. Neverthless there remained and even increased in pauperism. Why?

For Chadwick pauperism was not such a fact as we found no way-out other than making the law of population work properly. It was deterrable and preventible. So his strategy was double: repressive measures and preventive measures were needed. The former part was relflected in the published documents, including the 1834 Report. But the latter preventive part was left unpublished. Repression alone could not solve the problem. Preventive measures, a system of education for the labouring poor and sanitary regulations to relieve the burden of excessive sickness and premature widowhood and orphanage, were indispensable. He recognized that unaccompanied by the supplementary preventive measures, the new Poor Law took on harsher, more unsympathetic lineaments than he had intended.

It is interesting to see the strategical difference between Chadwick and others in their mitigating harshness of the new law. The Commissioner, at least Lefevre and Lewis, tried to do that by reintroducing the old ourdoor relief and the descretion of local authorities. It is no surprise that Chadwick objected to this return-to-the-past strategy. He clung to the principles of the Report. But it does not mean that he was insensible to the harshness of the new policy. He tried to bring in force his unpblished preventive measures in the process of implementation. That is why he pressed his educational measures in the workhouse and exposed himself objection by local magnates. The Commissioners and others aimed only at wiping out unpopularity of the new policy without resolving the problem itself, since for them pauperism could not be resolved with this or that practical governmental action. The working of the law of population was all. On the contrary Chadwick thought that ther were much room for government and administration to do for removing the causes of pauperism. In an inquiry into pauperism among military pensioners, he discovered the cause to lie in the mode of paying pensions in large quarterly sum, which provided a standing temptation to drunkenness. Change in payment of the pension would require almost no real increase in public expenditure. It seemed to be one of the shortest way to remove the causes of and prevent pauperism. Of course the causes were not always easy to remove. However many of them were not irremovable.