BULLDOGS AND UNEMPLOYMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 256, 29 October 1929, Page 6

BULLDOGS AND UNEMPLOYMENT.

Those who have been looking for . work during the last two or three years, and have found none or little, will be interested to learn, on the authority of the Christchurch "Press," that if they would only set their teeth and go after work ''in the bulldog 'manner of their fathers" they would get it. The phrase is not the "Press's" own. A New Zealand correspondent of the "Spectator" wrote recently to say that the first cause of our unemployment was' "the passing of the pioneering spirit and an unconscious weakening of the individualism of the working man," and that Ave were developing a .type who would not act in the aforesaid bulldog manner. The "Press" quotes this with approval, and says "everyone knows" (a variant of "every right-thinking person") that if people would only imitate the bulldog unemployment' would disappear. The "Press," however, does not explain how. an unemployed man is going to find work if there is no work for him. Not even being bailed up by a bulldog will draw a job from an employer if he has not one to give. How is looking-for work with set-jaws going to produce work for, say, an engineer, if the engineering: shops are slack, ,or for a builders' labourer when machinery is doing the work he used to -do? How. is a man going to carve, out a home for himself in the backblocks when he has not the money to buy a meal for himself' and his family?. Besides, the "Press" forgets that some of the pioneers had-to be helped by the State just as the unemployed are to-day. Many an immigrant found when he came to New. Zealand that the land Would' not keep him and was glad to get work on the roads. During the slump in the 'eighties thousands of men,, described bv a historian; as '"efficient, industrious and temperate," left the: colony ia despair., Did they lack the. bulldog jaw? The measures taken by the Government J to. relieve, unemployment are not- ideal, but in circumstances such as the present-the ideal is not to be sought. Immediate action'is required, and it is to the Government's, credit that itihas 1 .ken; such action. The alternative to providing work is to allow men to cat out their hearts, in idleness .supported by another form of State assistance—charitable aid