For Mills, the workhouse encouraged anything but work: on the contrary, he was impressed by 'the extraordinary amount of yawning that goes on' even in the best-managed institutions, by the useless imposition of such tasks as oakum-picking and stone-breaking, and by the disdain with which officials treated the poor.
For positive solutions, Mills looked to the independent-minded islanders of St Kilda, and the vagrancy colonies of the Netherlands, concluding that what was required was an “English experiment” in co-operative land settlement.
Mills was taken seriously enough to be invited to give evidence in 1888 to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Poor Laws, calling on the government to set up a series of land colonies, on which urban workers would learn to live by practicing their skills and trading with one another.
In 1892, the HCS bought a small farm at Starnthwaite, near Kendal, and by 1893 some 22 settlers were living and working on the estate.
The dissidents included Dan Irving, later a Labour MP, and the Bristol socialist and feminist Enid Stacey.