Singly and collectively these projects will no more affect “the unemployed” than scratching will cure leprosy. Every effect has its cause, which must be discovered before any permanent good can be done. Now the causes of want of employment (if men desire to find it) are political and economical. The business of the true reformer is to ascertain them and to remove or counteract them. Pottering with their effects, in the name of “charity,” is like dipping out and purifying certain barrels of water from an everflowing dirty stream. At the very best “charity” is artificial, and social remedies must be natural. Work cannot be _provided_. People have certain incomes and allow themselves a certain expenditure. If they give Booth, or any other charlatan, a hundred pounds to find work for “the unemployed,” they have a hundred pounds less to spend in other ways, and those who previously supplied them with that amount of commodities or service will necessarily suffer. Shuffle one pack of cards how you will, the hands may differ, but the total number of cards will be fifty-two. General Booth talks infinite nonsense about the “failure” of Trade Unions because they only include a million and a half of workmen. Rome was not built in a day, and even the Salvation Army, with God Almighty to help it, is not yet as extensive as this “failure.” Nor does the world need Booth to tell it the benefits of co-operation. He looks to it as “one of the chief elements of hope in the future.” So do thousands of other people, but what has this to do with the Salvation Army? The only part of Booth’s scheme which is of the least value is the one he has borrowed from a Freethinker. The Farm Colony is suggested by the Rahaline experiment associated with the name of Mr. E. T. Craig. But not only was Mr. Craig a Freethinker, the same may be said of Mr. Vandeleur, the landlord who furnished the ground for the experiment. At any rate, he was a disciple and friend of Robert Owen, who declared that the great cause of the frustration of human welfare was “the fundamental errors of every religion that had hitherto been taught to man.” “By the errors of these systems,” said Owen, “he has been made a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; and should these qualities be carried, not only into the projected villages, but into Paradise itself, a Paradise would no longer be found.”