WORK FOR THE UNEMPLOYED.—ROADS, SHIP CANALS, AND COKE.—IL R OAD-MAKING, though
it would be begging the ques- tion to call it unskilled, is, like digging trenches or making railways in a war zone, work which people, if they do not deliberately shirk work, can learn in a very few days. No doubt the road surveyors and contractors who deal with this kind of work would tell us that we are utterly mistaken in making such a statement. They would insist that it would be far better and cheaper in the end to have bodies of highly skilled navvies to do the work than a lot of out-of-work compositors, calico printers, boot factory hands and other unemployed. Certainly it would be ; but that is not the problem. The question is, if you have got to pay a certain number of persons, say, thirty shillings a week in any case, whether it is not better to let them work for what they are worth rather than let their manual power run wholly to waste. No doubt it is a great worry and trouble to marshal uninterested workers, but the thing can be done in civil life just as it can be done in the Army if the simple arts of organization are not neglected. For example, piecework should, wherever possible, be adopted. Our readers will remember the famous Millbank example where men, stacking bricks and stones, Lid four times the amount of work when they were paid so much per hundred bricks piled than they did when they were paid by the hour or day. Next, no doubt there might be three categories among the persons who, for various reasons, can only be employed by the hour. They might be easily classed as first, second and third class. workers, and paid accordingly. Below them. there should be a class of " unemployables," though one, would try to find a less aggressive name' for. them. Into this class the men who were trying. hard not to work would, be put. No doubt it would be difficult to find foremen and other officials to carry out the necessary selection with perfect accuracy and justice. Nothing can take the place of the beneficial knowledge that people are working for a profit, and that they are among the profit-sharers. Still, with a little trouble we believe that ca' canny " might .be partially, if not wholly, banished from work for the unemployed and left to what is often believed to be its more legitimate form of action, the preventing of capital earning a living wage, througli old businesses being extended or. new businesses being started.
Certainly the road-making should prove interesting ; and though we, of course, accept all the economic views as to the need for the maximum use of machinery in ordin- ary work we are not sure that a partial _return to hand labour in this special work should be forbidden. When roads are being made on economic lines, the contractor, of course, will employ _every sort of patent excavator ; but all these things cost money. The State would always buy them badly and dearly, and therefore it remains to be seen whether plain pick and spade and wheelbarrow labour would not prove as cheap in the case of the unem- ployed. If the gradient on New Hanger Hill has got to be reduced. from 1 in 6 to 1 in 20, we are not quite sure whether it would not prove quite as cheap to turn, say, two hundred men upon it without machinery as for the Great Pedlington District Council to insist on buying the very best patent machinery and getting it from a relation. of one of the Councillors " at a very reason- able price." When these machines had done their sole work. on New Hanger Hill, they would probably be left to rust " in case the Council should want them again." It is not necessary to dwell upon the usefulness of Toads ; but clearly, if all our chief roads were as wide as, say, the Great -North Road, and were not half put out of action by an occasional impossible hill, and again were not made death traps by blind corners—in fact, if our roads were, as they ought to be, made safe for motor omnibuses throughout the length and breadth of the land—we should have done a great deal to improve not merely pleasure conditions but also industrial conditions.
One of the advantages of road-making is that it is very easy to withdraw the workers. The closing of public works is, as a rule, an agony, but road improve- ments can in many cases be left half finished for the next trade depression without any great injury. It may seem a pity when you are going on a hundred miles journey to go forty miles of it on a beautifully planned road, with gradients such as Napoleon made on the Simplon, and the rest of your sixty miles on an old, narrow, curving, slap-uphill charging, water-course road. But, after all, it is better to have forty good. miles out of the hundred than to have the whole of the hundred devoured by bad miles. Another non-economic improvement, which would bo very useful, would be the digging of. ship canals in well- selected places ; or again, the damming and canalization of tidal rivers, so as to render them capable of bringing sea-going ships of, say, a thousand tons or.so, right into the 'very heart of the land. To put an inland place in touch with the ports of the world without the breaking of bulk is industrially a real achievement. There are hundreds of creeks and rivers in which this ideal might be carried out. Then, of course, there are the great ship canal schemes • like that between the Clyde and the Firth of Forth, or that other very attractive proposal for running ,a ship canal up the course of. the Axe at Bridgwater, through Somersetshire and Dorset, to the ChanneL. There is yet another project which at a time of depression might legitimately be carried out. Why should we not have 'a clean up of the air, or at any rate make an experiment and see whether the cleaning up i8 possible, as many people now assert it is, with great advantage to the State As our readers know, the ex- ponents of the low temperature carbonization of coal declare that, if Parliament absolutely forbade people to burn raw coal in their grates and deluge the air with the waste products of an. imperfect combustion, we should enjoy many happy results. The coal :before it got into our grates _would be treated by a simple. and easy process which 'would extract the benzol and power alcohol in sufficient .quantities to run All our motors and most of our steamships at far cheaperrates than are possible with petrol. Again, a great quantity of gas of reasonable calorific value and of very great illuminative power would be secured. Next, there would be several other valuable products which are now sent. up the chimney in smoke. These poison the air and rust our metals without filling out pockets. A kind of glorified coke would be produced during the extraction of the by-products. This glorified coke would _not be the cindery stuff which people in a hurry, declare they cannot get to burn in an ordinary ,grate,' but an excellent smokeless fuel throwing out a great deal: of heat, producing practically no ashes, and capable of " burning in open fires," heating rooms, and " remaining in " with the very minimum of stoking. In fact, the new coke would provide an ideal house and kitchen fuel. It is possible, though it is not our private opinion, that all this is theory and not fact. It may be that, though all these things could be done, to do them would prove so expensive that the nation would have to go out of business if it insisted on the low temperature carbonization of coal. That, no doubt, is a very obvious view for an owner of coal mines, or for the man engaged in the oil industry or in the old coke industry, to entertain. He is the man in possession of the existing system. He does not want to find large sums of new capital to start a new system. Suppose, however, that the Government were to erect the plant of low temperature carbonization on a big scale and to try the experiment of mass production. Probably they would not make a profit out of it. No Government has ever succeeded in doing that except by accident. They might, however, show other people how a profit could be made if the zest of private enterprise were added and the free stroke were substituted for the Government stroke. Here remember that if the road to success could in this matter be pointed by a big experiment we should have done an immense deal to help trade and industry, and to improve the health and happiness of the community. Imagine London irnd the great industrial smoke- laden areas of the north with skies through which the sun could pour its rays undefiled ! But we must not dwell too long on -this. The thought that such a boon is so near and yet that we may never get it is almost unbearable. Meanwhile, we have the unemployed, and we must put them to work—smoke or no smoke.
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