d of
his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and
broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end
these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped
his property with the iron clasp of legal right relaxes his grasp a
little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. In
this respect five years of war have taught us more than a century of
peace. It has set in a clear light new forms of social obligation. The
war brought with it conscription--not as we used to see it, as the last
horror of military tyranny, but as the crowning pride of democracy. An
inconceivable revolution in the thought of the English speaking peoples
has taken place in respect to it. The obligation of every man, according
to his age and circumstance, to take up arms for his country and, if
need be, to die for it, is henceforth the recognized basis of
progressive democracy.

But conscription has its other side. The obligation to die must carry
with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he
must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen
the opportunity of a livelihood. "Unemployment," in the case of the
willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic
Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial
policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women
"out of work," looking for occupation and unable to find it. Work must
either be found or must be provided by the State itself.

Yet it is clear that a policy of state work and state pay for all who
are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties.
The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money, for the
undertaking of public works of no real utility and for the subsidizing
of an army of loafers. But the difficulties, great though they are, are
not insuperable. The payment for state labor of this kind can be kept
low enough to make it the last resort rather than the ultimate ambition
of the worker. Nor need the work be useless. In new countries,
especially such as Canada and the United States and Australia, the
development of latent natural assets could absorb the labor of
generations. There are still unredeemed empires in the west. Clearly
enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential
for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able