Unionist Social Reform Committee

According to E. H. H. Green, the Committee "saw the earliest, detailed discussion of Conservative principles concerning the role of the State in the provision of social welfare".

Infighting continued, however, with Lord Salisbury emerging as one of the foremost opponents of regulating rural wages.

Steel-Maitland in reply argued that as demand for rural labour exceeded supply, there was no danger of unemployment and that a voluntary minimum wage would not bring underpaying farmers into line.

[4] In the Committee's 1914 book, Industrial Unrest, they argued: We have in this country now outlived that curious philosophic conception of the relations between the State and the individual which finds its origins in Rousseau and its most powerful exponents on this side of the channel in Bentham, the two Mills, Herbert Spencer and Cobden...[and that] the old Cobdenite and laissez faire view that the conditions of wages, health, housing and labour among the vast majority of the population of this country was the concern of private individuals and private contract has long since been abandoned.

[6] In an undated paper titled ‘The Theory of Public Health’, the Committee noted that "The boundary between private and the official sphere is constantly changing and sometimes eludes precise definition...[it is] true that the voluntary association of individuals here and there intercepts the necessity for public action...that does not affect the general proposition that the care and improvement of its subjects' health must occupy a large place in the outlook of every modern and civilised government".