Wartime welfare created a number of quandaries for poor relief officials. Simply because a son or husband was drafted, people who for years may have depended on poor relief fortuitously became eligible for much more generous wartime welfare. It was hard for relief officials to justify why these families should suddenly be treated in a preferential manner, or why other, equally needy families should not, and they were disturbed at the prospect that this preferential status might endure beyond the end of the war. They feared that the suspension of the poor laws during the war would unleash a massive wave of migration by the poor from the countryside to the cities and thus bring about a permanent geographical shift in the distribution of poor relief costs. They struggled to balance the demands of economy and the principle of deterrence against the government's policy of using wartime welfare as a means of preserving social and political stability on the home front. And they were worried that the constant harping on rights and the increasing willingness to depend on the assistance of others without any loss of social status or civic rights were weakening the self-reliance of the population. Although these questions exercised relief officials at the time, in the long run they proved to be issues of minor concern because other developments were challenging deterrent poor relief in more fundamental ways.