Unemployment.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19448, 23 October 1928, Page 8

Unemployment.

Tn his address ■ at Tinwald on Saturday night Mr T. D. Burnett said some things about unemployment which, though they are obvious enough, most people have a habit of forgetting. In its deepest aspects unemployment is beyond most of us, largely because it has never been thoroughly investigated, but before people start blaming the Government for it they ought to take some pains to be fair. We forget, to begin with, that we are still living in an age of mechanical changes—quite as remarkable, though no one ever speaks about them, as those which marked the industrial revolution. Even in the country districts, "where we do not look for sensational changes, present conditions are as unlike those of ten or twenty years ago as these were to the conditions of a generation earlier. Some fanners, for example, will still remember a time when it was considered a fair day's work for one man with two horses to plough 14 acres. Another furrow and two more horses made it quite easy to do 3J acres, and then the tractor with another furrow still upset all existing standards completely. It has been the same with dairy-farming and sheep-fanning, with fruit-farming, potato-growing, and bush-felling. Manpower has everywhere given way to the power of the machine, and will never again be-required in the old way. But only the ♦foolish or unprincipled would say that this is something which the Government might have avoided. The utmost any Government can do when a new process supersedes an old one is to temper the wind a little to the shorn lamb. Complete protection is out of the question, and although in the long run the new state of affairs means more work for everybody, it my produce serious dislocation during

the actual period of change. The Reform Government has done no more than its duty in providing work for as many unemployed of all classes as its resources would permit. Every Government must accept some measure of responsibility for industrial distress, though it nust also, in attempting to relieve it, fce careful as well as kind. But when people blame the Reform Government for the dislocations which have been produced by mechanical progress it is not unreasonable to ask what particular change in industry the Government should have forbidden. And the position is precisely the same with the labour of women. No Government can forbid women to earn a living in any way in which industry is willing to employ them, and no Government would try. But it is a faet all the same that the entry of women into the-fields of business and industry has greatly increased the competition for men. Mr Burnett does not blame women for invading the field: he says merely that they have invaded it, and that their presence is a factor which has to be reckoned with. Then there is the factor of waste—the' extravagance of the employer who puts his wool cheque into a new motor-car and of the employee who puts his shearing cheque into a wireless set before he has paid for the rest of the furniture. No Government can prevent people from spending money foolishly if they choose to do so. Governments can make folly more costly, and sometimes make it more difficult, but they 'can no more prevent it than they can guarantee good. seasons and bounteous harvests. The Reform Government has done more than any Administration which has been in office for a long time to discourage waste and encourage thrift, and it has not been content with mere preaching. It could, however, prevent waste only if it had the power to make everybody wise and strong, and before people blame it for the unemployment caused by waste they ought to make quite sure that they are doing nothing foolish themselves. „ >