ons ago Lancashire and Yorkshire were far
away from London, and the nation as a whole knew little and cared less
about hard times amongst cotton operatives or iron-workers in the remote
north.

It may be said with fair accuracy that Unemployment was scarcely
recognised as a social problem before the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, though in fact it had existed for centuries, and had been
prevalent for fifty years. Mill in his "Political Economy," which treats
so sympathetically of the state of labour under capitalism, has no
reference to it in the elaborate table of contents. Indeed the word
unemployment is so recent as to have actually been unknown before the
early nineties[40].

But the Trade Unionists had always been aware of unemployment, since,
after strike pay, it is "out-of-work benefit" which they have found the
best protection for the standard rate of wages, and nothing in the
program of Socialism appealed to them more directly than its claim to
abolish unemployment. Finally it may be said that unemployment is on the
whole more prevalent in Great Britain than elsewhere; the system of
casual or intermittent employment is more widespread; throughout the
Continent the working classes in towns are nearly everywhere connected
with the rural peasant landowners or occupiers, so that the town
labourer can often go back to the land at any rate for his keep; whilst
all America, still predominantly agricultural, is in something like a
similar case.

The Fabian Society had since its earliest days been conscious of the
problem of unemployment; but it had done little to solve it. The "Report
on the Government Organisation of Unemployed Labour," printed "for the
information of members" in 1886, had been long forgotten, and an attempt
to revise it made some time in the nineties had come to nothing. In
"Fabian Essays" unemployment is rightly recognised as the Achilles heel
of the proletarian system, but the practical problem is not solved or
even thoroughly understood; the plausible error of supposing that the
unemployed baker and bootmaker can be set to make bread and boots for
one another still persists. In 1893 we reprinted from the "Nineteenth
Century" as Tract No. 47 a paper on "The Unemployed" by John Burns, and
we had published nothing else.

In fact we found the subject too difficult. There were plenty of
palliatives familiar to every social enquirer; Socialism, the
organisation of industry by the community