English Socialists have always paid great and perhaps excessive attention to the problem of unemployment. Partly this is due to the fact that Socialism came to the front in Great Britain at a period when unemployment was exceptionally rife, and when for the first time in the nineteenth century the community had become acutely aware of it. In our early days it was commonly believed to be a rapidly growing evil. Machinery was replacing men: the capitalists would employ a few hands to turn the machines on and off: wealth would be produced for the rich, and most of the present manual working class would become superfluous. The only reply, so far as I know, to this line of argumentative forecast is that it does not happen. The world is at present so avid of wealth, so eager for more things to use or consume, that however quickly iron and copper replace flesh and blood, the demand for men keeps pace with it. Anyway, unemployment in the twentieth century has so far been less prevalent than it was in the nineteenth, and nobody now suggests, as did Mrs. Besant in 1889, that the increasing army of the unemployed, provided with work by the State, would ultimately oust the employees of private capitalism. Unemployment in fact is at least as old as the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the great Poor Law of 1601 was passed to cope with it. Whilst labour was scattered and the artisan still frequently his own master, unemployment was indefinite and relatively imperceptible. When masses of men and women came to be employed in factories, the closing of the factory made unemployment obvious to those on the spot. But two generations ago Lancashire and Yorkshire were far away from London, and the nation as a whole knew little and cared less about hard times amongst cotton operatives or iron-workers in the remote north. It may be said with fair accuracy that Unemployment was scarcely recognised as a social problem before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though in fact it had existed for centuries, and had been prevalent for fifty years. Mill in his "Political Economy," which treats so sympathetically of the state of labour under capitalism, has no reference to it in the elaborate table of contents. Indeed the word unemployment is so recent as to have actually been unknown before the early nineties[40].