Experiments in social legislation, dealing as they do with the lives and fortunes of human beings, are too costly to be undertaken often, or without a serious forecast of the consequences that possible failure may bring, not only to the individual but to the state; not only to this generation but to the next. "In dealing with the man," the Report of the Unemnployed Fund wisely points out, "the committee is also dealing with posterity." It might therefore be regarded as a part of our social duty to study the working-out of such experiments when they are offered to us, gratuitously as it were, with the costs to be paid by another nation. England has been furnishing one such experiment in its recent attempts to deal with the so-called "unemployed" and attempts to provide for this class are of rather special importance because they so often spell relief that they threaten to cause more evil than they cure. In the past few years, London has brought much money and sympathy, and what is more rare, thought and intelligent effort to bear upon this question, and she has much to teach us that we could not learn from our own extensive experiments of I893-94. For we were facing a sudden and appalling industrial crisis, and adopted makeshift plans in panic-stricken dismay; while in England, settled machinery under the control of the Local Government Board has been set up by act of Parliament, and we have the opportunity of study-