n a densely populated and highly industrialised
Socialist community, we should provide systematically for the orphans,
the sick, the physically or mentally defective and the aged on the one
hand, and for the adults for whom at any time no immediate employment
could be found. The Minority Report, whilst making immediately
practicable proposals for the reform of all the evils of the Poor Law,
worked out the lines along which the necessary organisation must
proceed, even in the fully socialised State. We had, in the Fabian
Society, made attempts to deal with both sides of this problem; but our
publications, both on the Poor Law and on the Unemployed, had lacked the
foundation of solid fact and the discovery of new principles, which the
four years' work of the Fabians connected with the Poor Law Commission
now supplied.

English Socialists have always paid great and perhaps excessive
attention to the problem of unemployment. Partly this is due to the fact
that Socialism came to the front in Great Britain at a period when
unemployment was exceptionally rife, and when for the first time in the
nineteenth century the community had become acutely aware of it. In our
early days it was commonly believed to be a rapidly growing evil.
Machinery was replacing men: the capitalists would employ a few hands to
turn the machines on and off: wealth would be produced for the rich, and
most of the present manual working class would become superfluous. The
only reply, so far as I know, to this line of argumentative forecast is
that it does not happen. The world is at present so avid of wealth, so
eager for more things to use or consume, that however quickly iron and
copper replace flesh and blood, the demand for men keeps pace with it.
Anyway, unemployment in the twentieth century has so far been less
prevalent than it was in the nineteenth, and nobody now suggests, as did
Mrs. Besant in 1889, that the increasing army of the unemployed,
provided with work by the State, would ultimately oust the employees of
private capitalism. Unemployment in fact is at least as old as the days
of Queen Elizabeth, when the great Poor Law of 1601 was passed to cope
with it. Whilst labour was scattered and the artisan still frequently
his own master, unemployment was indefinite and relatively
imperceptible. When masses of men and women came to be employed in
factories, the closing of the factory made unemployment obvious to those
on the spot. But two generati