and, we might almost say, to all common-sense. Its authors have had no experience of Poor Law administration, but are the leaders of the most powerful Socialist movement in the country. Their arguments are so inconclusive, so irrelevant to a solution of the problem and to difficulties which are common to all countries in which poor laws exist, that we cannot believe that they are intended as a serious contribution to the literature of the question. The Report, indeed, appears to be rather an attempt to trouble the waters for the coming Socialist fishing-party. Its authors are indeed perfectly frank in some respects. The scheme is admittedly a ballon d'essai. To those who criticise their proposals in regard to unemployment as visionary, their reply is: "It is not a valid objection that a demonstrably perfect technique, either with regard to the prevalence of unemployment or the treatment of the unemployed, has never yet been worked out. No such technique can ever be more than foreshadowed until it is put into operation." Utopian? they say; well, we have only to put it in operation and see. "Could there have been anything more Utopian in 1860 than a picture of what to-day we take as a matter of course, the seven million children emerging every morning washed and brushed from five or six million homes in every part of the kingdom, traversing street and road and lonely woodland, going o'er moor and fell, to present themselves at a given hour at their 30,000 schools, where each of the seven million finds his or her own individual place, with books and blackboard and teacher provided?" (p. 1215). The analogy, despite its poetic force, is a misleading one. The problem of organising public education and of providing "books, blackboard, and teachers" is a very different one from that of "abolishing
