Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
Fourthly, it will act wherever it is called upon as a Court of
Arbitration between litigants, where the decision will be according to
equity, and the costs cut down to the lowest possible figure.
Such a Department cannot be improvised; but it is already in a fair way
of development, and it can hardly fail to do great good.
SECTION 5.--OUR INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT.
An indispensable adjunct of this Scheme will be the institution of what
may be called an Intelligence Department at Headquarters. Power, it
has been said, belongs to the best informed, and if we are effectually
to deal with the forces of social evil, we must have ready at our
fingers' ends the accumulated experience and information of the whole
world on this subject. The collection of facts and the systematic
record of them would be invaluable, rendering the result of the
experiments of previous generations available for the information of
our own.
At the present there is no central institution, either governmental or
otherwise, in this country or any other, which charges itself with the
duty of collecting and collating the ideas and conclusions on Social
Economy, so far as they are likely to help the solution of the problem
we have in hand. The British Home Office has only begun to index its
own papers. The Local Government Board is in a similar condition, and,
although each particular Blue Book may be admirably indexed, there is
no classified index of the whole series. If this is the case with the
Government, it is not likely that the innumerable private organisations
which are pecking here and there at the social question should possess
any systematised method for the purpose of comparing notes and storing
information. This Intelligence Department, which I propose to found on
a small scale at first, will have in it the germ of vast extension
which will, if adequately supported become a kind of University,
in which the accumulated experiences of the human race will be massed,
digested, and rendered available to the humblest toiler in the great
work of social reform. At the present moment, who is there that can
produce in any of our museums and universities as much as a classified
index of publications relating to one of the many heads under which I
have dealt with this subject? Who is there among all our wise men and
social reformers that can send me a list of all the best tracts upon--
say, the establishment of agricultural colonies or the experiments that
have been made in dealing with inebriates; or the best plans for the
construction of a working man's cottage?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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