MR. BALFOTJR AND P 11:111 UNEMPLOYED.
NO sadder or more saddening deputation has ever waited on a Prime Minister than that which Mr. Balfour received on Monday. When women and children come on the stage we are brought face to face with un- employment in its worst shape. They are the greatest and the most helpless sufferers, those on whom the burden falls most heavily and who can do least to lift it from their own shoulders. Nor, if we regard. it only as a statement of fact, has any more telling document been drawn up than the memorial read. by Mrs. Woods. There are thousands of women and children brought very close to starvation by reason of their husbands being out of work. There are thousands more who have no husbands to look to, and are unable to get work for themselves, or can get it only at starvation wages. Dock labour, with its present want of organisation, is necessarily casual, and casual employ- ment " is one of the greatest curses of modern industry." Going to work too early prevents children from getting proper education, and in the end sends them to swell the continually growing army of unskilled labour. Men and women over forty get no fresh work if they lose that which they happen to have ; consequently each period of bad trade leaves behind it thousands of men and women for whom there is no employment when trade revives. Mistaken Poor-relief and mistaken charity enable people • to take wages on which, but for rate and voluntary aid, they could not subsist. Mrs. Stead, who spoke on behalf of the women of Southwark, said quite truly that the Act of last Session had done the un- employed a serious injury. It had raised. hopes and done nothing to fulfil them. Indeed, it has done less than nothing, for it has dried up the stream of private charity. We are glad. to see that the House of Commons, and in the end the Prime Minister, came in for their proper share of blame. The House of Commons passed the second reading of the Bill in its original form with only eleven dissentients. It was disgraceful, say the memorialists, that such a question had to be rushed through " because Members wanted. their holidays." On the surface of things, that is a perfectly fair taunt. If the reason why the Unemployed Workmen Bill was mutilated and deprived of its one really effective clause bad been the unwillingness of Members to put off their holiday for a week, it would have argued a perfectly heartless indifference to the " vital well-being of their poorer fellow-subjects." But we do the majority of the House of Commons more justice than to believe this of them. If they had been satisfied with the Bill as it first stood, they would have stayed in town in sufficient numbers to ensure its passing. As it was, they were greatly to blame, but not in the way the memorialists suppose. They read the Bill a second time, partly because it was a Government measure, and so presumably a good one ; partly because it promised to please the Labour party, and make some doubtful seats safer ; and partly perhaps because they could not bring themselves to believe that a Conservative Cabinet could introduce a really Socialist Bill. By degrees this last delusion disappeared, and as the true character of the measure stood disclosed their dislike of it became stronger. At the end of the Session Mr. Balfour spoke of the impossibility of carrying the Bill if the contentious clauses were retained in it. It would have been nearer the truth to say that the clause in dispute had proved to have a very disintegrating influence on his own supporters. The Conservatives had repented by August of their little incursion into the primrose path of Socialism. National workshops, on a scale nominally determined by the will of the local authorities, but really promising to be fixed by the number of men wanting State employment, came to wear a threatening aspect. Mr. Balfour's followers might not to any great extent have voted against him, but they would have become keenly sensible to the calls of health, of family, of necessary rest, which grow so numerous and so exacting as July gives place to August. Nevertheless, much as the Unionist majority deserve censure for seeming to play with the distress they were professedly relieving, the Government were greater sinners still. They were the authors of the Bill; they knew what was in it; they did not disguise either from themselves or the House the decisive character of the step they proposed to take. It is this that gives such a painful air of unreality to Mr. Balfour's speech on Monday. " Thou art the man I " might have been the reply made to every sentence of it. It was an excellent speech in itself. It would have been perfectly in place had it been delivered against the second reading of his brother's Bill. But when it came as a justification for letting the unemployed go- unrelieved except voluntarily, we do not wonder that it sounded strangely in the ears of a company of distressed women who six months before were being taught to believe that the King's Government had really taken their cause in band. Mr. Balfour is too clear-sighted and too cautious to try really dangerous experiments. He contents himself with putting his hand to the plough, and taking it back again in the comfortable conviction that he has at least made it im- possible for his Liberal successor not to go one better.
Passing to the question itself, it must be admitted, we fear, that it becomes more difficult the more closely it is looked at. The demands of the unemployed have become more definite, and at the same time more impossible. They now amount to nothing less than a State provision of work for every man who is unemployed and seeks employment. The assumption which underlies this demand is that the State has a bottomless purse, whereas the real truth is that the State has no purse at all. It has not a farthing of its own ; it has nothing but what' it takes out of the pockets of its subjects. With the money so obtained it has for more than three centuries secured every one of those subjects from actual want. It recognises that destitution constitutes a paramount claim on the community, that no man shall starve except of his own free will. Now it is asked to provide work for all who cannot get work from private employers. Parlia- ment is called upon to vote a formidable sum in order to create a demand for labour large enough to make it possible to take into the employment of the State every workman who finds private employment hard to come by. One member of the workmen's deputation did realise that Parliament cannot create work. " If there is no useful work to be done, the case is hopeless." But what is impossible for Parliament is possible, it seems, for the local authorities. They can organise useful work if Parliament gives them leave to do so. But why should a local authority be more successful in the creation of work than the Imperial Parliament ? It can, it may be, set men to work and pay them wages, but in what respect will any such action on the part of a County or Borough Council differ from similar action on the part of Parlia- ment ? If the work is wanted, and there is money to pay for it, it will have been undertaken, either by public or private enterprise, for its own sake. The fact that it has not been so undertaken is pretty fair evidence that the demand for it does not exist, and consequently that, if done at the cost of the ratepayers, it will be paid for by them in voluntary charity. That is a process which will continually cover a larger field. Workmen once taken on will not be able to be turned off, and as the employment will be more certain, and on the whole less severe, than the same work done for a private employer, there will be a constant stream of applicants for State employment. The Poor-rate bears heavily enough on the ratepayer, but the Employment-rate will bear more heavily still. The temptation to become a pauper is not yet excessive, but the temptation to enter the employment of the State, when the wish to do so is a sufficient passport, will be irresistible. The worst feature in the whole case is that any measures which have for their object the lessening of the numbers of the unemployed must be very slow in their operation. Emigration may do something. National and local economy may in the end set more private capital free to seek investment in profitable undertakings. The conse- quent reduction of rates may put an end to the exodus of great works from the neighbourhood of great cities. The conviction that it is a mistake to leave fairly certain employment in the country for problematical employment in London may check one of the causes which make the difficulty even vaster than it need be. But every one of these changes must be slow in coming about, and we have not yet begun to learn the lesson which must be mastered before the first move in any of these directions can be made. What is to be done in the interval ? Nothing that we can see beyond the fuller use of the machinery provided by the Poor Law. The best friends of the un- employed will be those who do most to convince them that, though the community cannot find work for them, it can give them relief. The desire to avoid becoming paupers is excellent in itself, but to take employment on works started solely to prevent men from becoming paupers is to avoid, not the thing, but the name. The essence of pauperism lies in a man's inability to support himself, and in the dependent relation towards the com- munity that this inability sets up.
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