anarchical movements: all the great continental countries are full of
this explosive material. Can we depend on our country keeping free from
the infection when we have far more poverty in our midst than the
neighbouring European States?" Emigration and temperance reform, he
thinks, may avert the danger.

The Rev. Samuel (later Canon) Barnett in the same review a month earlier
advocated Free Libraries and graduated taxation to pay for free
education, under the title of "Practicable Socialism." In April, 1883,
Emile de Lavelaye described with alarm the "Progress of Socialism." "On
the Continent," he wrote, "Socialism is said to be everywhere." To it he
attributed with remarkable inaccuracy, the agrarian movement in Ireland,
and with it he connected the fact that Henry George's new book,
"Progress and Poverty," was selling by thousands "in an ultra popular
form" in the back streets and alleys of England. And then he goes on to
allude to Prince Bismarck's "abominable proposition to create a fund for
pensioning invalid workmen by a monopoly of tobacco"!

Thirty years ago politics were only intermittently concerned with social
problems. On the whole the view prevailed, at any rate amongst the
leaders, that Government should interfere in such matters as little as
possible. Pauperism was still to be stamped out by ruthless deterrence:
education had been only recently and reluctantly taken in hand: factory
inspection alone was an accepted State function. Lord Beaconsfield was
dead and he had forgotten his zeal for social justice long before he
attained power. Gladstone, then in the zenith of his fame, never took
any real interest in social questions as we now understand them. Lord
Salisbury was an aristocrat and thought as an aristocrat. John Bright
viewed industrial life from the standpoint of a Lancashire mill-owner.
William Edward Forster, the creator of national education, a Chartist in