A hundred years ago the seed that was to grow into the welfare state was planted, when Beatrice Webb and other members of a royal commission on the poor laws issued their minority report. It was a document which the young William Beveridge, then working as a researcher for Sidney and Beatrice, used as a template more than 30 years later when he drew up his own plan for universal welfare in the middle of the second world war. The Webbs, for Sidney was as always in close consultation with his wife, dealt an ultimately fatal blow to the idea that paupers were to blame for their own condition and that provision for them should be at just above starvation level, lest other morally weak individuals be tempted to join them. Hence the workhouse, an institution designed to offer no comfort, no prospects and no hope. The American sociologist C Wright Mills was later to observe that if one man in a city of 20,000 people is unemployed, his condition might be ascribed to defects of character, but that if 1,000 are out of work, the fault must lie elsewhere. The Webbs underlined the structural causes of poverty and argued that the solution was universal provision of services by the state in all the varied areas where citizens needed help. The minority report and the less radical majority report were rejected by the Liberal government of the day. Workhouses lingered on in various forms and the poor law itself lasted until 1948 - but Beatrice had already written its obituary in 1909.