460 president's address section gi. 



In Australia it is a question whether there is at the present 

 time any unemployment. At the present moment Queensland could 

 find work for double its population. As might be expected, in this 

 large, thinly-populated island continent, the need is employees, not 

 employment. The high wages demanded in some trades may lead 

 to temporary disturbances — to strikes, lock-outs, or the withdrawal 

 of capital from certain centres — but that is an artificial unemploy- 

 ment, and the distress is mitigated by strike pay. Australia, in 

 common with the older countries of Great Britain, Germany, and 

 the United States, has already had acute industrial differences 

 between employer and employed. Such differences the world over 

 have given birth to a set of men who subsist by industrial war. 

 " In the journals and speeches of these men," says Goldwin Smith 

 in " Questions of the Day," nothing is said about the improvement 

 which the artisan might make in his own condition by thrift, 

 temperance and husbanding of his means ; he is told only of the 

 advantage he might gain by industrial revolution." 



From 1906 to 1909 in Great Britain an average of 1'5 per cent, 

 of the population applied for assistance to the relief committees. 

 During that time the unemployed in trade unions varied from 4 to 

 10 per cent. If to these members have to be added those who 

 though out of work are maintained in part or wholly by relatives, 

 those who though indigent are too sensitive to apply for public 

 relief, and those who being unemployed in legitimate work prefer a 

 life of dishonesty and crime to an honest occupation, the estimate 

 of 10 per cent, of the population being unemployed will be found 

 to be not far from the mark. Of these, at least 3 per cent, may be 

 classed as chronics. From the year 1893 to 1908 the rate of pauper- 

 ism (exclusive of casuals and insane) per 1 ,000 of estimated popula- 

 tion (in England and Wales) varied from 23-5 (in 1893) to 21-1 (in 

 1900). In the same period the percentage of members of trade 

 union members unemployed (in the United Kingdom) varied from 

 2-4 (in 1899) to 8-0 in 1908, and in 1909 the percentage of unem- 

 ployed had risen to 10 in every 1,000. Since 1860 there have been 

 in Great Britain seven periods of trade depression, culminating in 

 the years 1862, 1868, 1879, 1886, 189,3-4, 1904 and 1908. The 

 years 1870-6 and 1895-1902 were of fat kind, and the ranks of 

 unemployed were comparatively very small. 



The Industrial Residuum. — It is this industrial residuum of 

 approximately 10 per cent, that sociologists most handle. With 

 the true industrials there need be but little trouble. Trades unions 

 point the way. Classification, and labour bureaux, registration and 

 insurance against unemployment, give a plain and fairly easy 

 road out of the difficulty. But what of the helpless residuum — 

 those who have no foresight and no self-control ; who live for the 

 present only ; who are merely the footballs of circumstance ; whose 

 lives are one incoherent jumble from beginning to end ; who are the 

 merest children in economics ; who know no law but self-indulgence 

 and have bred in them an insuperable aversion to steady work ; 



