UNEMPLOYMENT
Unemployment Among Boys. By W. McG. Eager and H. A. Secretan. (Dent and Sons. 2s. 6d. net.) Unemployment : a Suggested Policy. By J. W. Scott. (A. and C. Black. Is.) TOE authors of the first of these books, devoting their lives from utterly unselfish motives to London Boys' Clubs, have a claim on our attention over and above their intimacy with the subject they expound. It is a short and a sad book. Its size is doubtless the cause of some omissions on which we would gladly have had the writers' views. There is scarcely a reference to parental responsibility. We are left to suppose that boys from good homes are beyond the scope of the
book, and that those with whom it is concerned come of parents who either cannot, owing to wretched circumstances,
or will not be bothered with their children's real welfare. Nor are the writers concerned with any effort to uproot the Bermondsey boy and plant him where he would gain morally and physically and find himself wanted, namely, in rural England or overseas. We can see a score of obstacles, but one boy's salvation is worth great efforts. The book is sad not only because the economic outlook is so gloomy, but bemuse of the demoralization of those to whom 2naxima debetur recerentia. We know nothing sadder than the picture of a good lad who becomes a club officer by merit, and then,
falling out of work, finding himself unwanted, loses all the best that was developed in him, moral and intellectual.
That these boys should be well taught and brought under good influence in schools provided mainly at other people's expense until they are fourteen seems to the writers and many others only a half-measure on the part of the State. Certainly their parents, who had much the same " advantages," have somehow or other made little of them. The well-meant activities of the new Juvenile Employment Centres have also proved to be ineffective, makeshift barriers against disastrous forces, confused efforts of the Board of Education and Ministry of Labour. The authors say truly that the years of adolescence from fourteen to eighteen are as important in the education of the future man as the years before fourteen. They can only offer the counsel of despair, that the State should be charged with the care of all boys and girls to the age of eighteen : that the education of all boys should be continued, part-time, up to the age of eighteen in schools adapted to their purposes, including technical and physical training. Temporarily they would extend Unemployment Insurance down to school- leaving age, making the payment of benefit conditional on attendance at Unemployment Centres, which should be definitely educational institutions. It is a gloomy prospect, but we are grateful to the authors for putting it plainly before us. If the boy himself after school age (a tender enough age in all conscience) and his parents cannot from moral or economic causes be trusted to look after his welfare in adol- eseence, it would not be a much greater interference with the liberty of the subject to suggest his removal from the slums to those rural areas at home or overseas. That would be the drastic, the inhumanly reasonable solution. Professor Scott would take a step in that direction by taking classes of urban children from school for a week at a time to live and work on a " Homecroft " Settlement within easy reach of their
homes. His pamphlet is an exuberant amplification of the • ideals on which he has already written in the Spectator. Ile feels that industrialism is killing that vital affinity between
human beings and their Mother Earth. He wants the mechanic and the factory worker to live in a house on a glorified allot- ment which, with the family's help, should produce all the food they need with the important exceptions of red meat and
bread. Shorter hours in the factory and more on the " Homecroft " would be no economic loss to him and a gain in other directions. Unemployment would mean more wealth in kind to meet the loss of wages:: Professor Seott's idealistic optimism is an antidote to Berniondsey despair, and we wish all success to his gospel, for We believe in the moral and physical value of contact with the soil.
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