This was so far recognised at the time that one of the bitterest opponents of the measure, Sir William Chance, a stern disciple of the Charity Organisation Society, described it as "a Poplar Bill framed to meet Poplar's needs." So it was. For Poplar's needs just then were the needs of the unemployed. And the unemployed's needs were the same all the country over. The Bill was introduced about the time the Poplar Guardians took a census of the unemployed in typical working-class streets in the district, revealing over twenty-four per cent. of the wage-earners out of work. The Bill was based on the principle which had guided Crooks in all his dealings with the unemployed. The only sound way to help an unemployed man, he maintains, is by work rather than by relief. The condition he imposes on the provision of such work is that it must be useful. He will have nothing to do with "works" provided only as "relief." Work that is not useful can never relieve. His agitation in Parliament put the crown on fifteen years of laborious striving to make the State admit a duty to its unemployed citizens. As far back as September, 1893, he was appealing in the _Daily Chronicle_ to the Board of Trade and the Thames Conservancy to help in allaying the threatened distress of the coming winter by reclaiming foreshores. His appeal was taken up at the time by other papers, which complimented him upon the practical common-sense character of his proposals. Somewhere in the archives of the Board of Trade that scheme of his doubtless lies buried to this day. He is still confident it will be carried out some time. He is fond of saying that it takes Parliament seven years to grasp a new idea and seven more to carry it out. Compressed into a few lines in his own words, the story of his effort runs in this way:--"It was in the November of 1893 that in consequence of what I had been saying at public meetings and in the Press, I was urged to lay the scheme before Mr. Mundella, who was President of the Board of Trade at the time. There was great suffering that winter, and the Local Government Board advised all the local authorities to put in hand as much public work as possible. Well and good, I said, but let the Government do the same. I pointed out that under the Foreshores Act of 1866 the Board of Trade had power to reclaim land. Again, under an Act of 1857 the Thames Conservancy could reclaim miles of foreshore in and below London. I showed that this was just the kind of work to absorb unskilled labour, and supplied examples of the success of reclaiming land on the banks of the Forth and the Tay and on the Lincolnshire coast."