Excerpt from The Labour Question in Britain Dawn is preceded by twilight. Something is in the air of which we are vaguely conscious long before we can definitely make out what it is. There are hints to-day of a new method of treating social phenomena, by presenting an accurate picture of them with a view to demonstrating the laws which determine and govern them. Man, it is thought, can thread his way through the midst of these phenomena and handle them with all the certainty of precise knowledge. A great revulsion of feeling has taken place. Until recently the mere idea of the scientific and methodical observation of social phenomena encountered the most determined opposition on all sides. No one would admit that a man who devoted himself to studies of the kind, however rigorous his methods might be, could succeed in disentangling some threads of the huge and complex web of society. Only the wiser heads of politicians, from their heights of power or speculation, were considered qualified to grapple with the problem and to offer to the rest of the world such solutions of the ever-changing riddle as time and place seemed to require. Thus the true method of all reliable knowledge was reversed, that method which, instead of proceeding from a confused and summary view of a vast whole to the consideration of the part, proceeds from the study of the most minute part to that of a contiguous part, and thence little by little, without risk of error, to that of the whole. Experience and reflection, however, have borne fruit. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.