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 for the community, we regarded as the real and final remedy.  But between the former, such as labour bureaux, farm colonies, afforestation, the eight hours day, which admittedly were at best only partial and temporary, and Socialism, which was obviously far off, there was a great gulf fixed, and how to bridge it we knew not.  At last the Minority Report provided an answer.  It was a comprehensive and practicable scheme for preventing unemployment under existing conditions, and for coping with the mass of incompetent destitution which for generations had Been the disgrace of our civilisation.