UNEMPLOYMENT AND PUBLIC UTILITIES.

IT is one of the misfortunes of the political crisis and the dissolution that the unemployment problem, instead of being approached in a cool and sober spirit, has been cast into the melting-pot heated by the fires of party strife and personal rivalries. All the same, what we may term the physical and human side of the problem remains over. It is this which we desire to discuss to-day. There is not one man less among the unemployed because Labour has lost or won, the Capital Levy been vetoed, or Protection left dead on the field.

We must regard unemployment not as a tragedy, or even as a subject of melancholy or anxiety, but rather as an opportunity to do certain necessary and useful work which cannot be done when " full steam ahead " is the commercial order of the day.

Translated into the language of practical business this means that we must employ the unemployed to do useful work. We must be careful to select the things which most need doing in order to ensure a well- ordered nation able to cope easily with a condition of high commercial activity as soon as that condition returns—as return it will, if we only have patience, and if the rest of the world will allow us a period of peace in which to grow the plants of Progress and Prosperity.

The thing which is most required to make our national life run more easily and so more cheaply is improved transport. Especially do we need in such a small and closely-packed country as ours " door-to-door " transport. This means in the first place more and better roads. If we calculated in detail the waste of time and money, and the unfavourable psychological reactions caused in our transport system by our inefficient and insufficient roads, we should be horrified. It is only because we do not see what we are losing that we tolerate roads so utterly inadequate.

(1) We want new arterial speed-roads which will take extra fast and heavy through traffic, roads on which no horse traffic will be allowed, roads fenced from intrusion, roads on which tolls will be paid.

(2) New switch-roads must be made in order to avoid congested urban areas and narrow village streets, to form short cuts, and to relieve crowded roads. This will not injure the towns and villages which will be nominally side-tracked. The through traffic does them no real good, though it may make them look busy. On the contrary, it does them great harm by rendering them unsuitable for residential purposes.

(3) Our old roads must when necessary, and that means usually, be widened wherever possible, improved by the elimination of bad corners, and rendered more

• The address of the " Life and Liberty Movement " J8 117 Victoria Street, 3.W.1.

" negotiable " by reducing steep gradients. Nothing is more wasteful and injurious to a road as a whole than retaining steep gradients. It is not only very costly from the point of view of road repair, but it involves unnecessarily high horse-power, or else light loads,. in motor vehicles. The existence of one or two sharp gradients on a road may make a road unusable by low- powered cars, and also cause appreciable petrol waste in the cars which do use it.

(4) In our towns the streets must be reorganized, and wherever possible parallel lines of traffic must be arranged to relieve the chief arteries. Again, viaducts and tunnels, or a mixture of both, must in certain cases be constructed in order to carry traffic over or under at main crossings.

(5) We must have more and wider bridges and viaducts.

(6) We should have a wide coast road, say inland from high-water mark on an average about two miles, round the whole of the British coast. The bigger estuaries would, of course, often take the road inland more than two miles. The road need not be a new road, in most of its course, but only an " improved road." Already men's needs and the existing conditions have laid the foundations of a continuous coast road.

(7) In all these cases the greatest care must be taken to protect the amenities of the countryside.

Respect for the beauty of England and the making of more and better roads are by no means incompatible. All that is wanted is care, ingenuity and imagination. The new arterial speed-roads, if properly planned, may indeed not injure but add to the amenities of the dis- tricts through which they pass. The bridges and main approaches should give those • opportunities for nobility and largeness in design for which our architects pray, or ought to pray. Think what magnificent gateways to mere villa roads were made even in the heart of the country by Popes, Cardinals, Princes and Nobles throughout Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some such structural invitations to the road should be given us here—but on a still grander scale. Our architects will be building for the state and majesty. of England and not merely for a duke or marquess, and their creations should be proportionately the more magnanimous. The new bridges should be specially designed for beauty as well as use. There are eighteenth- century bridges over torrents in the heart of the Apen- nines which are worthy of Rome. Let the great arterial road, say, between London and Birmingham, such as Lord Montagu of Beaulieu desires to give us, span the " Great Pedlington Turn-Pike Trust Highway " with a bridge which, though of ferro-concrete, shall breathe the spirit of Wren at his greatest.

The arts of the planter must also be invoked. Every new road should be lined with trees, as again is pro- vided for in Lord Montagu of Beaulieu's plan. No tree would be amiss, but for ourselves we favour the apple, the pear and the plum, especially the apple, planted in double rows on each side. Nothing is more beautiful than apple-blossom in spring, unless it be red-ripe apples in September on the tree, or in heaps on the grass in October.

Next to road-making for the unemployed, we should like to urge the claims of the ship canal or river canalized to bring sea-going ships into the heart of the country. If the same ship can bring raw material to the factory doors from overseas and return laden with the finished product, the industrial saving will be immense. Whether the Clyde and Firth of Forth Canal is a sound pro- position, or, again, whether the scheme to take ships from Bridgwater to the Dorset coast is economically acceptable, we cannot say ; but unquestionably there are many of our semi-inland towns which would be very much better for being endowed with direct access to the salt water.

- Yet another species of work well suited to unemploy- ment is land reclamation—reclamation either from the sea or from waterlogged and marshy river valleys. Reclamation from the sea. must no doubt be pursued with caution, but what man has done in the Fens man can do again. We see no reason, that is, why the scheme for the reclamation of the Wash, which when proposed a hundred years ago so greatly struck the imagination of the British people, should not in our day be taken up and carried through. We were glad to seethe Daily Express using its influence recently to get due consideration for a plan which aims at providing land for small cultivators by turning the Wash into dry land. The scheme should be designed on a complete scale, but it need not be finished in haste.

In dealing with exceptional unemployment such as that with which we are now faced, our Administrators must remember to be bold as. well as generous. They must fix their eyes constantly upon the principle that since they must not only keep the unemployed alive, but must also keep them in good condition physically and morally and intellectually, they must get the true value of work that they pay for but of the man paid.

This sounds so elementary as to be hardly worth insisting on. As a matter of fact, it is a principle which will be indirectly attacked from many directions. To begin with, there will be a tendency to say that it would be " cheaper in the end and much more satisfactory " to have even road work done by " pitoper men," and to let persons not accustomed to use the spade and pick stand aside and be merely fed. That impulse must be :steadily resisted.

It is, no doubt, much less trouble to foremen and all the necessary and unnecessary officials and bureaucrats who organize public works to use accomplished navvies But, after all, the essential object is not to do things comfortably or smartly, but to utilize the man-power which has accidentally come into the possession of the State. It was the same in the War. To begin with, the military authorities hated to take the man who 'was either not very young or had undergone some military training in the past. They had, they declared, no use for a man of forty who had been a factory hand for twenty-five years. He would, we were assured, never be of any value as a soldier. In the same way it was said that the Cockney would never be able to dig trenches. He learned, however, to do so quite effectively in a fortnight or less. Masses of men with no previous training of any sort were used at the front not only to dig trenches, but to make roads and to build railways and do similar work. Here the present writer may perhaps be allowed to record a personal -experience. He lately took part in the following con- versation with an ex-soldier, now a butler : " Had you 'any experience of digging before you joined up ? "

• " No, I was a footman when the War began, and having started in private service I had never done any spade work before I went to France." " Did you find it hard to learn ? " " Not a bit. Of course, I was awkward the first day or two, but I, and the rest like me, hadn't been at it for more than a very few days when we found we could do it nearly as well as the old hands."

" Was that only in the case of the trenches ? " " Oh no ; at times I did lots of road-making and also railway • building, and found no difficulty." " You don't think, • then, that it will be impossible to get the unemployed to make roads here ? " " Certainly not. They can do it as well as we could, especially if they let 'em wherever possible work Army. fashion. You've got so much stuff to move each day, and you can do it quick or slow as you like."

That my interlocutor was not talking through his hat I am sure. He is a man who weighs his words, though he does not think butler's work renders a man incapable of dirtying his hands with earth, or of doing what hundreds of artists and men of letters do in their gardens without being spoilt for their occupations and professions.

But it will be said " Many of the unemployed have too bad a physique to do hard work." To that the obvious reply is, " If they are too ill to work, they should be sent to hospital till they recover. If they are merely out of condition, let them be given easy tasks till they get into training, as they soon will." In many cases work on the roads may prove a physical blessing for the unemployed, just as military work did during the War. In Heaven's name, don't let us yield to the sneers of the skilled navvy, or of the conven- tionally-minded foreman. who says that " it makes him sick to see the way these Cockneys handle a pick," and that he'd rather have four properly trained navvies on a job " than a couple of dozen of clerks, compositors or shopmen." Let us determine to get as much work as he can give us without injury to health from every man who has to ask for work, and not be deflected by ignorant flouts and jeers from that piece of common sense backed by experience. J. ST. LoE STRACHEY.