and striking in vain in the face of a falling market. After that, he will be lucky if he does not find himself one of the unemployed, with no wages to strike about, high or low. Then he will learn, as he did in 1886 and 1887, that the remedy of his flatterers in parliament for starvation caused by want of employment is the policeman's bludgeon and the Mansion House Charitable Fund, in alternate doses. Under our commercial system, Trade progresses by alternate expansions and contractions. The capitalist must have "a reserve army" of unemployed always to take men from as trade expands, and to fling them back into as it contracts. Each wave, counting from one commercial crisis to the next, takes usually about ten years to complete itself. That means that five years of rising wages, accompanied by successful strikes and the formation of new Trade Unions in all directions, is followed by five years of falling wages, unsuccessful strikes, the bankruptcy and break-up of the mushroom Unions of the period of prosperity, and finally the multiplication of the unemployed and a terrible spell of hard times. Our last period of prosperity, it will be remembered, began at the end of 1887. It is nearly five years since then; and the tide is already turning. The hard times are coming back again. If the workers take some trouble to improve the House of Commons at this election, it may, when the distress comes, set the Local Government Board to work to stir up the Boards of Guardians and other local bodies to meet the emergency by employing labor on those public improvements for which there is no commercial demand, although they are needed everywhere for the general convenience. But if the workers leave the House of Commons as it is, they must put up, when the bad time comes, with the pawnbroker, the stoneyard, the bludgeon, and the beggar's dole. For the unemployed cannot be helped at the expense of the ordinary ratepayer, but by special taxation of the rich; and no House of Commons in which Labor is not strongly represented will touch the incomes of the rich.

It would be idle to add another word. If the sting of preser poverty, with the dread of worse poverty in the near future and the recollection of it in the near past cannot rouse the workers t action, print and paper cannot do it. Freedom will cost a struggle and sacrifice which, though too hard for a few to sustain, will be light enough for each when all are ready and willing to share it. The workers know this already: it remains now for them to act upon it.

G. STANDRING, Printer, 7 & 9, Finsbury Street, E.C.

THE FABIAN SOCIETY:

ITS EARLY HISTORY.

By G. BERNARD SHAW.

A PAPER READ AT A CONFERENCE OF THE LONDON AND PROVINCIAL FABIAN SOCIETIES AT ESSEX HALL ON THE 6TH FEBRUARY, 1892,

AND ORDERED TO BE PRINTED FOR THE INFORMATION OF MEMBERS

PUBLISHED AND SOLD BY

THE FABIAN SOCIETY.

PRICE ONE PENNY.

LONDON:

THE FABIAN SOCIETY, 3 CLEMENT'S INN, STRAND, W.C. PUBLISHED 1892. REPRINT 1906.