ABSTRACT
The 1909 Report placed the government in an impossible position which was made all the more impossible by the Webbs' decision to organize a campaign for the abolition of the Poor Law along the lines advocated in the Minority Report. This was a clear attempt to force the government's hand, and no government worth the name was going to permit this. The challenge was, nevertheless, a formidable one, and assumed huge dimensions. It brought the Webbs out into the open, and mass public meetings took the place of the small dinner parties in Grosvenor Road. The campaign was an enthusiastic one; it tended to capture the young and the radical, and though it did not mention a Welfare State it pointed to something like it and so collected to its ranks all those who wanted finally to turn their backs on Victorian England. The New Statesman1 sprang out of the movement, which, though not necessarily socialist in itself, pointed to something like a socialist approach to public welfare. Such a journal was bound to influence the growing Labour Party. On the other hand, the Webbs were to some extent discredited by their godchild for it underlined their committal to collectivist
policies, and suggested that the Royal Commission was, to them in their turn, an instrument for furthering Webbian policies.
