THE SLUMP AND UNEMPLOYMENT.
THE slump has come, as we all of us in our hearts knew it must come. It was inevitable, and in one sense it is a blessing in disguise because, as if by a surgical operation, it will cut away what was poisoning the com- munity. That is felt by most of us in our secret thoughts. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that the process through which we are to obtain economic health once again is full of anxiety, if not indeed of peril. The analogy of the surgical operation is exact. We know that the operation is the only chance for health and security in the future. We cannot live without ft, and yet we have to recognize that there are great dangers in the cure. If at the moment we were asked what we thought was the greatest risk of the situation, we should reply, Quack remedies." In the pain and depression which we must all suffer we shall long for ease, forgetfulness, and renewed strength. And we shall be offered all sorts of lightning cures. One set of people will prescribe opiates or strong sedatives. Others will propose patent pain- killers, while a third section will offer a marvellous tonic invented by an anchorite in the Andes or a seer in Siberia, which will not only get us over our present troubles but will redouble our strength and power ! It will be madness to dope ourselves with any of these nostrums. They are not only incapable of helping us, but they will actually make a cure impossible. We have to remember once more the analogy between physical and economic and political health. The symptoms that give us pain and which are so alarming are the begin- pings of our cure. If we violently suppress those symptoms by huge unemployment doles, by inflated credits, by hauling down danger signs wherever we see them and pre- tending that they don't matter, and finally by substituting rage and rhetoric, conflict and civil strife for hard and productive work, there can only be one end—the end which we all understand.
When we say this we do not mean that we want to do nothing or that we are not to try to alleviate suffering. We must do that. We are not going to let any section of the community die in this country from starvation. Every one has the right to live, and we must see that everything is done not merely to stop starvation, but to prevent injury to the national health and to the national morale. But as a safeguard we must see that as far as possible we do not give mere doles. Those peo le who receive money from the State must make a fide• in useful and where possible productive labour. Of course we fully realize, as the French found in 1848, that it is much easier to say that you will provide useful public work than to find it. All the same, it can be found, and by a curious accident there are two things greatly required in this country, which if we have pluck, energy, and organizing spirit, and are not afraid of demagogues on the one hand and of pseudo-humanitarians on the other, we can accomplish. One of the first pieces of mechanism in modern industry and indeed in civilization is transport. It is not too much to say that transport is the life-blood of modern industry. Though railways, ships, and even flying machines may do a great deal in the way of transport, the chief word in transport will always be the road with the wheeled vehicle on the road. That this must be so can easily be shown. We live on roads and not on railways. The first thing that a man has to do when he builds a house in a field is to connect it by a road to the other roads of the country. Then the blood of the social organism will circulate, and the dweller in the house can live.
Now it happens that our roads, though many, are unfortunately not quite as numerous as they ought to be. What is still more unfortunate is the fact that they are very badly planned, or not planned at all, for the work they have to do. They are not wide enough to carry the traffic which they will very soon be asked to carry. Further—this seems a small point, but is a most important one—every three or four miles on the roads in the greater part of England there is a hill, often quite a small hill, but with a gradient so sharp that it gives what can only be described as a serious wound to traffic. There are many small producers or tradesmen who could get their goods to and from market comparatively cheaply but for a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards of bad bill between town and door, or station and door. This bad gradient either requires stronger horses or smaller carts, or, worst of all, more expensive motors and a larger consumption of petrol. The trouble is not very visible, but if there could be a notice- board by many of these badly graded hills saying what each car had expended in extra wear and tear and extra petrol, and what the loss on the other forms of transport had been, the world would be amazed at the huge tribute extorted by the hills. But that would not be the only " Waste Notice Board " upon the hills. There would be another recording almost as big a sum, which would be labelled " Waste in road repair caused by steep gradients." The steepness of our hills prevents the road material staying upon the hill in times of bad weather. Many of our hills are water courses in a storm. The water rushes down them in a torrent and wears away even a tarred surface. Next, the hoofs of the draft animals and the wheels cut more deeply going up and down steep inclines than they do on the flat. Generally, the wear and tear, and therefore the repair of the bad gradient, are excessive.
Another need is the widening of our roads, not every- where, but in a great many places. To prevent an unduly expensive widening of the highways there is room for new switch roads, which, without any harm to the village or town, but rather with advantage to it, could deflect the traffic from the crowded main street. That street is and always will be a playing place for a great many of the inhabitants, old and young. The main street ought not to be a raging, tearing highway, forced to bear traffic which does not help the village or small country town because it goes through unregardingly, only thinking of its goal some fifty miles away. Finally, we need one or two great new arterial roads which will heir to make our road-borne traffic quick and efficient. All these things require the most skilful planning and also skilled superintendence during execution, but they do not require skilled labour. There is no more skill required in the greater part of road-making than there is in army work. If our enlisted men were good enough to fight the Germans and to carry out the complicated duties of an infantry soldier or gunner, or engineer, or member of the A.S,C., our unemployed are quite capable of doing road work, even if they have not all the thews and sinews of navvies. The work is open-air work, and will neither degrade nor injure the worker, but rather will improve his health as much as the army life improved it in those lucky enough not to suffer wounds or disease. Of course, it will be quite possible for the statistician to say that the trained navvy could do more efficient work than the untrained, and that therefore unemployed labour is not economical and so forth, but we venture to say that such talk is wholly illusory. In cases in which, and, alas ! we feat there will be many this winter, it is necessary to help the unem- ployed man to live, it is madness on an economic punctilio not to exact real work from him.
We must set our faces firmly against the people who say it will be cheaper in the end to pay a dole rather than to start public works. That might be ' so if public works were not needed, or if .the only public work whioh we had to offer was in some place to which men would have to be brought at great expense. This, however, if ordinary care is taken, is not so with the roads. The road is every- where, and everywhere men live on roads. Therefore, speaking generally, road making, is a universal need and also a universal remedy. For the last ten years every one has known that we must sooner or later, and the sooner the better, have a great campaign of road-making in this country. Therefore it would be a positive insult to the Departments concerned, local and central, not to feel sure that the officials have got everything planned and ready. They, of course, know exactly the proper place, whether to north or to south, where the switch road at Little Peddlington ought to be made ; and, exactly where the curve or cutting must be made to prevent the middle bit of Blackbrow Hill remaining a nightmare to the motorist with a low-powered car or to the man with the weak- legged horse. There is another form of -activity which is as widely applicable as road-making and even more the burning !need of the hour. It is house-building. But this means, again, more road-making. We are entirely with those who say that in England and Scotland at least a million new houses are needed. But, as we all know, these houses are not being built, either because there is a positive shortage of labour, or else because those whose manual work is the building of houses do not, for various strange reasons which we shall not discuss for fear of causing feeling care to practice except at a minimum rate of production. We will only say that the proposition we have just made is not disputable. A man who could quite easily lay 1,200 bricks a day is precluded by the rules of his craft from laying more than 350. We cannot be said to be attacking the workers in the building trade when we draw attention to this fact. In these circumstances, and in view of the great want of employment among many well- educated and industrious men, it is obvious that these unemployed should be set to work forthwith on building the houses which we all need.
" But," it will be said, " how can they build houses ? That is skilled labour and they are unskilled men or, at any rate, unskilled in house-building." Our answer is, " Train them." We venture to say when this process of training is begun it will be found. that in most cases it will take much less time to teach them to do competently, if not with exquisite perfection, the work of house-building than it does to drill and train a soldier. A very stupid or a wholly uneducated man will no doubt be a long time in learning, but we are sure that the educated man, such a man, for instance, as an ex-officer or ex-N.C.O., or any man who has had a secondary education, and most men who have had a primary education, will learn brick-laying in a month or six weeks. During a good deal of the learning period the novice will be quite capable of doing useful work— provided always, of course, that he has somebody to point out his mistakes or prevent him trying those attractive short cuts which experience has shown don't pay. Learn- ing to mix mortar and other things of that kind will prove plain sailing to the educated man. So will a good deal of rough carpentry.
The greater part of the new houses that are wanted are small houses in which the more daring arts of the brick- layer, of the mason, and of the carpenter are " not in the Bill." No doubt it wants a lot of experience in bricklaying to build some slender campanile or some factory chimney, or to do the intricate work inside a theatre, with its wide spans and pillars set upon nothing, or upon a ledge which will just bear them if the thing is done with exquisite precision but will tumble down when put up by somebody who has not got the subtle trick of helping the architect to violate the theory of strains. In building the rural cottage or small town house, however, such delightful legerdemain is not required. The present writer is not talking through his hat. In America, in the Dominions, and in the over- seas world generally, many men build the houses in which they live. The tremendous mystic and ritual line drawn between the various crafts and forms of construction is a portent of hyper-civilization. When people are buildina° a house, or a warehouse, or a railway station in partibusinfidelium„ any sensible white man who comes along and offers his service, though he has never laid bricks before in his life, is soon set to work. But even if this were not so, there are several forms of building that can be adopted, such as concrete construction and pisg de terre, which obviously require only muscular strength and common sense, and demand little or no training. Our object at the present moment, however, is not so much to prove that there is a great deal of cant and nonsensical talk about skilled labour as to show how essential it is to fix our minds upon two points—first, that in doing what is necessary to alleviate suffering we take the greatest possible care not to burden the nation beyond endurance, and secondly, to remember the old and in many ways perfectly true saying that a nation can always have as many unemployed as it cares to pay for. However many people are thrown out of work in other trades, there are two trades which are calling loudly for workers. If we answer those calls wisely and faithfully we shall confer an enormous permanent benefit on the nation. Our need for more and better houses is desperate, and so is our need for more and better roads. It is up to our statesmen to link the unemployment to these two demands, and to link it without the mad extravagance at present in vogue, which in the end will only bring more unemploy- ment and more misery in its train.
There was never a moment when we more wanted steadfastness, courage, and true humanity and goodwill in our governors. Have we got leaders equal to the occasion We hope and trust we have. It is their duty to show their metal. All that critics like us can do, and we certainly intend. to practise what we preach, is to refrain from unfair criticism and to offer helpful criticism and to make every just allowance for the many difficulties with which we fully realize the Government must struggle.
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