Section 5.— OUR INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT.

An indispensable adjunct of this Scheme will be the institution of what may be called an Intelligence Department at Headquarters. Power, it has been said, belongs to the best informed, and if we are effectually to deal with the forces of social evil, we must have ready at our fingers' ends the accumulated experience and information of the whole world on this subject. The collection of facts and the systematic record of them would be invaluable, rendering the results of the experiments of previous generations available for the informa­tion of our own.

At the present there is no central institution, either governmental or otherwise, in this country or any other, which charges itself with the duty of collecting and collating the ideas and conclusions on Social Economy, so far as they are likely to help the solution of the problem we have in hand. The British Home Office has only begun to index its own papers. The Local Government Board is in a similar condition, and, although each particular Blue Book may be admirably indexed, there is no classified index of the whole series. If this is the case with the Government, it is not likely that the innu­merable private organisations which are pecking here and there at the social question should possess any systematised method for the purpose of comparing notes and storing information. This Intelligence Depart­ment, which I propose to found on a small scale at first, will have in it the germ of vast extension which will, if adequately supported, become a kind of University, in which the accumulated experiences of the human race will be massed, digested, and rendered available to the humblest toiler in the great work of social reform. At the present moment, who is there that can produce in any of our museums and universities as much as a classified index of publica­tions relating to one of the many heads under which I have dealt with this subject ? Who is there among all our wise men and social reformers that can send me a list of all the best tracts upon — say, the establishment of agricultural colonies or the experiments that have been made in dealing with inebriates ; or the best plans for the construction of a working man's cottage ?