And, with characteristic
impudence, we intimated also that, if the Government wished to try the
issue, it might find that the legal copyright was not in the Crown at
all, as the actual writer of the Report, to whom alone the law gives
copyright, had never ceded his copyright and was not a member of the
Royal Commission at all! At the same time we prepared to get the utmost
advertisement out of the attempt to suppress the popular circulation of
the Report, and we made this fact known to the Prime Minister. In the
end the Treasury Solicitor had to climb down and withdraw his objection.
What the Government did was to undercut us by publishing a still
cheaper edition, which did not stop our sales, and thus the public
benefited by our enterprise, and an enormous circulation was obtained
for the Report.
The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission--although never, from
first to last, mentioning Socialism--was a notable and wholly original
addition to Socialist theory, entirely of Fabian origin. Hitherto all
Socialist writings on the organisation of society, whether contemporary
or Utopian, had visualised a world composed exclusively of healthy,
sane, and effective citizens, mostly adults. No Socialist had stopped to
think out how, in a densely populated and highly industrialised
Socialist community, we should provide systematically for the orphans,
the sick, the physically or mentally defective and the aged on the one
hand, and for the adults for whom at any time no immediate employment
could be found.
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