slaves of the Labour
Department you own."

"The Labour Department! In some way--that is familiar. Ah! now I
remember. I saw it when I was wandering about the city, after the
lights returned, great fronts of buildings coloured pale blue. Do you
really mean--?"

"Yes. How can I explain it to you? Of course the blue uniform struck you.
Nearly a third of our people wear it--more assume it now every day. This
Labour Department has grown imperceptibly."

"What _is_ this Labour Department?" asked Graham.

"In the old times, how did you manage with starving people?"

"There was the workhouse--which the parishes maintained."

"Workhouse! Yes--there was something. In our history lessons. I remember
now. The Labour Department ousted the workhouse. It grew--partly--out of
something--you, perhaps, may remember it--an emotional religious
organisation called the Salvation Army--that became a business company.
In the first place it was almost a charity. To save people from workhouse
rigours. There had been a great agitation against the workhouse. Now I
come to think of it, it was one of the earliest properties your Trustees
acquired. They bought the Salvation Army and reconstructed it as this.
The idea in the first place was to organise the labour of starving
homeless people."

"Yes."

"Nowadays there are no workhouses, no refuges and charities, nothing but
that Department. Its offices are everywhere. That blue is its colour. And
any man, woman or child who comes to be hungry and weary and with neither
home nor friend nor resort, must go to the Department in the end--or seek
some way of death. The Euthanasy is beyond their means--for the poor
there is no easy death. And at any hour in the day or night there is
food, shelter and a blue uniform for all comers--that is the first
condition of the Department's incorporation--and in return for a day's
shelter the Department extracts a day's work, and then returns the
visitor's proper clothing and sends him or her out again."

"Yes?"

"Perhaps that does not seem so terrible to you. In your time men starved
in your streets. That was bad. But they died--_men_. These people in
blue--. The proverb runs: 'Blue canvas once and ever.' The Department
trades in their labour, and it has taken care to assure itself of the
supply. People come to it starving and helpless--they eat and sleep for a
night and day, they work for a day, and at the end of the day they go
out again. If they have wor