I do not, as will appear later, advocate the equal distribution of wealth. I do assuredly not plead that one who has wealth should give it to the poor: to see it gather again, perhaps, in less worthy hands. I add the contrast of wealth at this point only in order to make quite sensible the darkness of the life of millions. One's first task is to establish, with what faint power the pen has, the appalling magnitude of the evil. If any very large number of us did really grasp the human significance of these facts and figures, the industrial problem would not long be resigned, as it is, to bloodless economists and obscure propagandist bodies. And the second aim of those who would see the world bettered is, as I said, to inquire into the effect of the remedies we actually trust and apply. Here we enter the mistier region of controversy, and I can but set out the grounds of my sincere convictions. Of labour bureaux, in the first place, it will not be doubted that they are an advantage to employed and employers. They are an advance toward organisation. They bring the worker more promptly to the work that awaits him. But they, obviously, do not add one iota to the insufficient work, for which myriads are struggling: they do not add one penny to the wage that is earned: and they are of little or no service to the poorest workers, who chiefly concern us. Old age pensions and insurance and free education are, similarly, great advantages to the workers, in which we may justly take some pride, but they do not promise to abolish or greatly diminish poverty. The pension, or the insurance benefit, is necessarily granted on the poverty scale, and is in some sense a recognition of it as one of the permanent institutions of life; and the elementary instruction which we give has raised the qualifications for work, as well as the equipment, so that the proportion of unemployed, or ill-employed, is little changed. Nor would it be entirely wrong to say that, in relieving the poor man of the direct charge of education and insurance, we have put the difference on his rent. Of our poor-law system, that lamentable compromise with a stupid old tradition, it is difficult to speak with patience. The able-bodied idlers of our workhouses and our countryside are a mockery of the workers. The tramp, the professional idler in search of idleness, maintained in his repulsive ways by an undiscriminating system of poorhousing and by a large body of "charitable" women, is one of the quaintest survivals of an older order. His father idled through life before him, and he in turn drags along the road a mate and children who will sustain the ignoble tradition. He ought to be washed, clothed, and put on an industrial estate; and, if his disease prove incurable, he ought to be anæthetised out of existence, or at least prevented from reproducing his like.