in trying to solve the problem of "finding work for the unemployed." At the time of its enactment, and for many years afterwards, the main industry of the country was that of spinning and weaving, and naturally the provision of artificial employment usually took that form. Hundreds of schemes were devised " for the better employment of the poor," and hundreds of experiments made during these 230 years. The commonest was that of providing parish "stocks," that is to say, stocks of flax, wool, hemp, etc., to be worked up by the poor. The Overseers, whose duty it was to do this, answered to the Distress Committees of our day. These schemes uniformly failed, and the author of "Robinson Crusoe" pointed out, as far back as 1704, that if the State gives work to one man it takes it away from another, and that the effect of such employment is merely " to transpose our manufactures and confound our trade; for every skein of worsted spun in a workhouse there must be a skein the less spun by some poor family who spun it before; to set poor people to work upon the same thing that other poor people are employed upon is giving to one what you take away from another, putting a vagabond in the honest man's employment." So, too, under the new Socialism, most of us must know cases in which the ordinary workman has been thrown out of employment because the work has been given to the unemployed. Most of the work done by the unemployed of London in the parks and elsewhere at a heavy loss would otherwise have been done economically and well by the ordinary workman in the open market. I am afraid that the effect has been too often that of putting a vagabond in an honest man's employment. Under the old Poor Law, again, things came to such a pass that at last no one could get employment at all except through the parish, and it seems
