president's address — SECTION GI. 461) 



either the necessity or the use of farm colonies in so vast and 

 prosperous and thinly inhabited a countn- as Australia. 



Reorganising Industry. — II. There are some who despair of 

 solving the question of unemployment until Society is reorganised 

 and all industries come under a form of socialism. That day is far 

 off yet. It is not certain that it will ever come. It is far less 

 certain that any form of socialism would absorb, on a remunerative 

 basis, all the industrial wrecks, the tramps, the wasters, the feeble- 

 minded, the criminals, and all the host of hopeless unemployables. 

 State remedies may go far to reduce the undesirable classes, and 

 indeed, as we will show later, there are man}- indirect means by 

 which the class of the unemployed can be brought within com- 

 paratively easy handling, but neither in commonism, nor in col- 

 lectivism, or in any plan, however skilfully devised of socialism, 

 will unemployment automatically cease. At one time compulsory 

 and universal profit-sharing was loudly lauded as a bulwark against 

 the evils of unemployment, but profit-sharing, as such, as Professor 

 Nicholson points out, furnishes no guarantee against instability of 

 earnings and fluctuations of employment. " No system of division 

 of proceeds can be a guarantee that the proceeds will be forthcoming. 

 The greatest perseverance would be no remedy against over-pro- 

 duction, or the loss of a foreign market, or the popular adoption of 

 some substitute for an old staple. In any event the opinion may 

 be hazarded that unemployed margins can be effectively and 

 economically handled without socialising all industries. 



A Threefold Problem. — The whole problem is partly moral, 

 partly physical, partly economic. There is the morally inefficient 

 surplus, the great horde of those whose conduct, life and morals 

 unfit them for employment. They are the empty bags that cannot 

 stand upright ; the class who do not want work and could not 

 work if they had the opportunity ; they are the hopeless and 

 irresponsible ; the hand-to-mouth classes who neither know nor 

 care where to-morrow's breakfast is to come from. Drink, dis- 

 honesty, crime, and sheer laziness breed this class daily, and the 

 process of deterioration is intensified generation after generation. 



There is also the physical side. Bad surroundings, scanty food, 

 insanitary dwellings, and want of exercise all contribute to swell 

 the sickly class. The mentally deficient or the feeble-minded are 

 estimated in older countries to be only two per thousand of the 

 population, but it is unfortunately from this class that the ranks 

 in penetentiaries, asylums, reformatories, workhouses, inebriate 

 retreats, maternity hospitals and women's refuges are mostly 

 recruited. Often enough relief is wasted in making parenthood 

 easy among the conspicuously unfit, and in offering inducements to 

 the spread of future misery. There is, thirdly, the economic side. 

 Even if economic conditions do not wholly account for the magni- 

 tude and complexity of the later stages of unemployment, they 

 most certainly lie at the root of the problem. Mr. Booth remarks 

 in his work on " Labour and Life of the People in London " that 



