SPENDING FOR UNEMPLOYMENT
[To the Editor Of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—The lead which the National Association of Building Societies, in the interest of employment, has given to its constituent societies by urging them to recommend their members to put in hand repairs and improvements is one which might well be followed by other bodies.
Regard it how we may. we have sooner or later got to face the fact that we cannot expect a return of prosperity by merely sitting down and waiting for it. Somehow or other we have got to re-start the wheels of industry, and though individual repairs may not seem to mean very much, repairs multiplied by a million represent a very considerable item.
A similar appeal might well, I think, be made to Local Authorities to put in hand the many schemes which were suspended eighteen months ago at the instance of the Govern- ment. The cry that we could not afford them seemed plausible enough at the time, but it no longer holds, and as long as work is crying out to be done it seems foolish in the extreme to go on paying unemployment benefit to the men who might thus be employed. Wise spending is the line of true economy.
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