Between the first and the third paper there is a stretch of twenty-one busy years, 1884-1905, and the article bears the marks of Canon Barnett’s intense realization of the need of higher education, and his almost passionate demand for it on behalf of the industrial classes. “Social Reform,” he writes, “will soon be the all-absorbing interest as the modern realization of the claims of human nature and the growing power of the people will not tolerate many of the present conditions of industrial life.... The well-being of the future depends on the methods by which reform proceeds. Reforms in the past have often been disappointing. They have been made in the rights of one class, and have ended in the assertion of rights over another class. They have been made by force, and produced reaction. They have been done for the people, not by the people, and have never been assimilated. The method by which knowledge and industry may co-operate has yet to be tried, and one way in which to bring about such co-operation is the way of University Settlements.” So many are the changes which affect _Poverty and Labour_, so rapidly have they come about, and so keen and living an interest did Canon Barnett feel with every step that the great army of the disinherited took towards social justice, that it has been difficult to select which papers on which subject to reprint, but I have chosen the most characteristic, and also those connected with the reforms which most influenced character and life. In this Section also some of the many papers which Canon Barnett wrote on Poor Law Reform have been admitted. I know that the activities of the Fabian Society and the “Break up of the Poor Law” organization have rendered some of the ideas familiar, but many of the Reforms he advocated are not yet accomplished, and to those who are conversant with the subject, his large, sane, unsensational statement of the case, as it appeared to him, will be welcome,--all the more so because for nearly thirty years he was a member of the Whitechapel Board of Guardians, the Founder of the Poor Law Conferences, and had both initiated and carried out large administrative reforms. He also had a very deep and probing tenderness for the character of individual paupers, and a sensitive shrinking from wounding their self-respect or lowering the dignity of their humanity, an attitude of mind which influenced his relation to schemes sometimes made by paper legislators who considered the poor in “the lump” instead of “one by one”.