The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission—­although never, from first to last, mentioning Socialism—­was a notable and wholly original addition to Socialist theory, entirely of Fabian origin.  Hitherto all Socialist writings on the organisation of society, whether contemporary or Utopian, had visualised a world composed exclusively of healthy, sane, and effective citizens, mostly adults.  No Socialist had stopped to think out how, in 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 generations 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.