empt to deal with a pressing social problem on constructive lines. It
surveys the field, analyses the phenomena presented, and suggests
practicable remedies. It is however a very cautious document. Webb was
then old as an economist, and very young as a Socialist; none of the
rest of the Committee had the knowledge, if they had the will, to stand
up to him. Therefore we find snippets from the theory of economic
"balance" which was universally regarded as valid in those days.

"In practice the government obtains its technical skill by attracting
men from other employers, and its capital in a mobile form by attracting
it from other possessors. It gets loans on the money market, which is
thereby rendered more stringent; the rate of interest rises and the
loans made to other borrowers are diminished,"

But the particular interest of the Report at the present day is the fact
that it contains the germs of many ideas which more than twenty years
later formed the leading features of the Minority Report of the Poor Law
Commission.

At that time it was universally believed that the slum dwellers of
London were mainly recruited by rural immigrants, and this
error--disproved several years later by the painstaking statistical
investigations of Mr. (now Sir) H. Llewelyn Smith--vitiates much of the
reasoning of the Report.

After analysing the causes of unemployment on lines now familiar to all,
and denouncing private charity with vehemence worthy of the Charity
Organisation Society, it recommends the revival of social life in our
villages in order to keep the country people from crowding into the
slums. The Dock Companies are urged to organise their casual labour into
permanently employed brigades: and it is suggested, as in the "Minority
Report," that "the most really 'remunerative' form of 'relief' works for
the unemployed would often be a course of instruction in some new trade
or handicraft" Technical education is strongly recommended; Labour
Bureaux are advocated; State cultivation of tobacco is suggested as a
means of employing labour on the land (private cultivation of tobacco
was until recently prohibited by law), as well as municipal drink
supply, State railways, and "universal military (home) service" as a
means of promoting "the growth of social consciousness,"

The Report is unequal. An eloquent but irrelevant passage on the social
effects of bringing the railway contractor's navvies to a rural village
was possibly co