The Treasury Solicitor was rash enough to threaten us with an injunction on the ground of infringement of the Crown copyright and to demand an instant withdrawal of our edition. But Government Departments which try conclusions with the Fabian Society generally find the Society better informed than themselves; and we were able triumphantly to refer the Treasury Solicitor to a published declaration of his own employers, the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, a score of years before, in which they expressly disclaimed their privilege of copyright monopoly so far as ordinary blue books were concerned, and actually encouraged the reprinting of them for the public advantage. And, with characteristic impudence, we intimated also that, if the Government wished to try the issue, it might find that the legal copyright was not in the Crown at all, as the actual writer of the Report, to whom alone the law gives copyright, had never ceded his copyright and was not a member of the Royal Commission at all! At the same time we prepared to get the utmost advertisement out of the attempt to suppress the popular circulation of the Report, and we made this fact known to the Prime Minister. In the end the Treasury Solicitor had to climb down and withdraw his objection. What the Government did was to undercut us by publishing a still cheaper edition, which did not stop our sales, and thus the public benefited by our enterprise, and an enormous circulation was obtained for the Report. The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission--although never, from first to last, mentioning Socialism--was a notable and wholly original addition to Socialist theory, entirely of Fabian origin. Hitherto all Socialist writings on the organisation of society, whether contemporary or Utopian, had visualised a world composed exclusively of healthy, sane, and effective citizens, mostly adults. No Socialist had stopped to think out how, in a densely populated and highly industrialised Socialist community, we should provide systematically for the orphans, the sick, the physically or mentally defective and the aged on the one hand, and for the adults for whom at any time no immediate employment could be found. The Minority Report, whilst making immediately practicable proposals for the reform of all the evils of the Poor Law, worked out the lines along which the necessary organisation must proceed, even in the fully socialised State. We had, in the Fabian Society, made attempts to deal with both sides of this problem; but our publications, both on the Poor Law and on the Unemployed, had lacked the foundation of solid fact and the discovery of new principles, which the four years' work of the Fabians connected with the Poor Law Commission now supplied.