It was the beginning of the winter of 1904. He had spent the afternoon in one of his interminable battles in Parliament urging that preparations should be made to act wisely instead of waiting until panic-stricken, and that the usual wild schemes for helping the unemployed would once again result in waste and demoralisation. "I stood for a minute or two interested in the hurry and scurry of people hastening to clubland, to dinner parties, and to theatres," he afterwards remarked when recalling the incident. "Then, turning my back on the West End, I wended my way eastward. Yes, a terrible worry the unemployed, and yet how few people seemed to realise it. Never-ending lines of conveyances, long queues of pleasure-seekers thronging the theatre doors, all the externals of my surroundings pointed to everything but unemployment. But straight in front of me was my home in Poplar, and I knew that in a few more minutes I should be hearing a tale of some family's misery, considering myself a lucky man if I spent a few minutes indoors without someone calling to ask, 'Can you help to get me a job?' "Truly to some of us the unemployed are a terrible worry, not only in December, January, and February, but summer and winter, night and day, all the year round. But more terrible than the unemployed themselves is the heart-breaking carelessness of the British public, which, generous to a fault, will not make up its mind until stirred by sensational appeals. "'Oh, but,' some of my political opponents say to me, 'the unemployed are generally such a shiftless, good-for-nothing class. What good can you expect to do with such men? I quite sympathise with your keenness, but they are a very worthless, thankless lot, and you are wasting a lot of time over them.' "Well, suppose we allow that as a class the unemployed retain a large measure of original sin. I know other classes possessing the same weakness, but neither class prejudices nor racial hatreds interest me very much. So, for the sake of argument, we will say that the unemployed are very imperfect. This is one of the reasons why my Labour colleagues and I want to press home the importance of England making a praiseworthy effort to grapple with the problem. We see how quickly a workless man deteriorates. A person out of work in October, unless promptly dealt with, is in danger of becoming by the following March that social wreck known as a loafer. And I object to loafers at both ends of the scale, whether in Park Lane or in Poplar." In the issue of _Vanity Fair_ containing "Spy's" popular cartoon of Crooks, the Labour member himself had an article on the unemployed.