EMPLOY THE UNEMPLOYED
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The leading article in the Spectator of July 11th, on the suggestion to " Employ the Unemployed " by letting them make for one another appears to have released some very important reflections in the minds of your readers ; and I would not intervene again to raise a finger, were it to damp a discussion which I have been praying to see started for years. But I must state at least one of the difficulties I see.
When Mr. St. Loe Strachey came behind' our Homecrofts in 1925, the " slogan " he gave us was " Sustenance, not sales." From the idea of a family aiming at part of its sustenance to that of a group providing its whole sustenance, 'is but a short step. And this is the interest of the plea of Mr. De'Ath, following Mr. Leakey, that it could be done by self-supporting groups of unemployed, planted in the wastes of Australia.
He says the Doukhobors have done it. But has he seized the problem ? Either the Doukhobors survive, not by being independent of the surrounding competition but by being successful in it, as primitives let loose upon a more advanced community habitually do. Or, if they are independent, they are insulated and held together as a group by their customs. How are these rigidities which sometimes preserve a primitive group, as an independent self-supporting unit, to be replaced?
What would happen to an attempted group in the Australian hinterland is plain. They could easily fill their central store with the chief necessaries of life if you paid them wages for it. But they would not spend their wages at the store. The outside world would flow in with its gew-gaws and trinkets, its cheap mass products ; the wages would go on those ; the community's goods would waste on its shelves ; and the workers would slowly filter away to find jobs where the gew-gaws were made. The independent group would melt into the general competition.
The only solution of this difficulty, I believe, is on the
lines of Captain Petavel's suggested " second plan " in his letter in the Spectator of June 27th, on " India and the Unem- ployed." There must be a way of paying your group with a peculiar currency which will not be accepted elsewhere. And if that could be done—but the details of it have nowhere been worked out to my knowledge—there would be no need to go to Australia. It could be done, as you suggest, " in this
country too."—I am, Sir, &c., J. W. Scorn
(Hon. Sec., National Homecroft Assn., Ltd.). 88 Charles Street, Cardiff.
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