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 contributed by Hubert Bland, whilst the conclusion, a magniloquent eulogy of the moral value of Government service, written, according to Webb’s recollection, by Frank Podmore, is evidently the work of a civil servant who has not got over the untamed enthusiasms of youth!

The Report shows immature judgment, but also in parts remarkable foresight, and a complete realisation of the right scientific method.  With State tobacco farms and the public organisation of a corps of peripatetic State navvies, the childhood stage of the Fabian Society may be said to conclude.