An eminent socialist complained to me with tears in his eyes that nothing was being done for the poor. I do not agree. Not enough, certainly, but something, and every day more and more. The world is a slow world, and Nature, like all such artisans, does her building and painting and decorating with exasperating deliberation. Geology is slower than the South Eastern Railway. But no doubt Providence intended each of them to go at the pace they do for our good. And it is impious to grumble. Nevertheless, if I were a sculptor called upon to design a symbolic statue of Nature, I should model a plumber. Slow, hesitating, occasionally mixing the taps and flooding the world's bathroom or exploding the gas mains in the cellars of the earth, but in the end doing the job somehow--such is the way of Nature. You cannot cinematograph the growth of the world or its rocks and trees and human beings--to study Nature you want long life and a microscope. And the only way to make out whether the tide is coming in or out is to place a mark upon the shore and wait and see. It is the same if you are travelling an unknown road--you measure your progress by the milestones. In this matter of the law and the poor, if we want to know where we are to-day and where we are likely to be three hundred years hence, the only sane way to make the experiment is to go back to what we know of things in the past, and, by measuring the progress made in bygone centuries, take heart for the morrow. That is what Sir Walter Raleigh meant when he told us how to gather a sane policy for to-day out of the blunders and troubles of yesterday. As I grope my way back along the main road of the history of the law into the dark ages I seem to find the milestones of reform set at longer and longer intervals. This puts me in good heart for the happy youths whose lot it will be to set their faces towards the morning breezes of the future. Their milestones will come at shorter intervals every day, until the burden of the law drops from the shoulders of the poor at the wicket gate. There is no greater folly than to sing the praises of the good old days. Anyhow, the law had no good old days for the poor. Stroll down to the dockyards with Samuel Pepys; take a walk down Fleet Street with Dr. Johnson; or, even as late as the days of Charles Dickens, go round the parish with Mr. Bumble. You will learn in this way better than in any other how the law has treated the poor in the good old days. I have a quaint little volume written for the Dogberries of the early eighteenth century called "The Compleat Constable." It is amazing to read of the tyranny of the law towards the poor and the homeless of those days. The statutes made for punishing rogues, vagabonds, night walkers and such other idle persons are, says the anonymous legal author, "a large Branch of the Constable's Office, and herein two things are to be known:-- "(1) What is a Rogue and who is to be accounted a Vagabond?