age of loose promiscuous pauper emigration has gone by.  If we are to use foreign emigration as a mode of relief for our congested population in the future, it will be on condition that we select or educate our colonists before we send them out.  Whether the State or private organizations undertake the work, our colonizing process must begin at home.  The necessity of dealing directly with our weak surplus population of low-skilled workers is gaining more clear recognition every year, as the reluctance to interfere with the supposed freedom of the subject even where the subject is “unfree” is giving way before the urgency of the situation.

Sec. 4.  Mr. Charles Booth’s “Drainage Scheme.”—­The terrible examples our history presents to us of the effects of unwise poor law administration, rightly enjoin the strictest caution in contemplating new experiments.  But the growing recognition of the duty of the State to protect its members who are unable to protect themselves, and to secure fair opportunities of self-support and self-improvement, as well as the danger of handing over their protection to the conflicting claims of private and often misguided philanthropy, is rapidly gaining ground against the advocates of laissez faire.  It is beginning to be felt that the State cannot afford to allow the right of private social experiment on the part of charitable organizations.  The relief of destitution has for centuries been recognized as the proper business of the State.  Our present poor law practically fails to relieve the bulk of the really destitute.  Even were it successful it would be doing nothing to prevent destitution.  Since neither existing legislation nor the forces of private charity are competent to cope with the evils of “sweating,” engendered by an excess of low-class labour, it is probable that the pressure of democratic government will make more and more in favour of some large new experiment of social drainage.  In view of this it may not be out of place to describe briefly two schemes proposed by private students of the problem of poverty.

Mr. Charles Booth, recognizing that the superfluity of cheap inefficient labour lies at the root of the matter, suggests the removal of the most helpless and degraded class from the strain of a struggle which is fatal not merely to themselves, but to the class immediately above them.  The reason for this removal is given as follows—­

“To effectually deal with the whole of class B—­for the State to nurse the helpless and incompetent as we in our own families nurse the old, the young, and the sick, and provide for those who are not competent to provide for themselves—­may seem an impossible undertaking; but nothing less than this will enable self-respecting labour to obtain its full remuneration, and the nation its raised standard of life.  The difficulties, which are certainly great, do not consist in the cost.  As it is, these unfortunate people cost the community one way or another considerably more than they contribute.  I do not refer solely to the fact that they cost the State more than they pay directly or indirectly in taxes.  I mean that altogether, ill-paid and half-starved as they are, they consume, or waste, or have expended on them, more wealth than they produce.”