e added the unemployment represented by the interval between
the termination of one job and the beginning of another, as in the
building trades. Lastly, the wider fluctuations of general trade seem to
impose a character of irregularity upon trade, so that the modern System
of industry will not work without some unemployed margin, some reserve
of labour.

These irregularities and leakages seem to explain why, at any given
time, a certain considerable number of fairly efficient and willing
workmen may be out of work. It is often urged that this class of
"unemployed" must be regarded as quite distinct from the superfluity of
low-skilled and inefficient workers found in our towns, and that the two
classes present different problems for solution. The character of the
"chronic" class of unemployed makes the problem appear to be, not one of
economic readjustment, but rather of training and education. But this
appearance is deceptive. The connection between the two kinds of
"unemployment" is much closer than is supposed. The irregularity of the
"season" and "fashion" trades, the periodic spells of bad trade, are
continually engaged in degrading and deteriorating the physique, the
morale, and the industrial efficiency of the weaker members of each
trade: these weaklings are unable to maintain a steady and healthy
standard of life under economic conditions which make work and wages
irregular, and are constantly dropping out of the more skilled trades to
swell the already congested low-skilled labour market. Every period of
"depressed trade" feeds the pool of low-skilled labour from a hundred
different channels. The connection between the two classes of
"unemployed" is, therefore, a close and vital one. To drain off this
pool would, in fact, be of little permanent use unless those
irregularities of trade, which are constantly feeding it, are also
checked.

Still less serviceable are those schemes of rescuing "the unemployed,"
which, in the very work of rescue, engender an economic force whose
operation causes as much unemployment as it cures. A signal example of
this futile system of social drainage has been afforded by certain
experiments of the Salvation Army in their City Works and Farm Colony.
The original draft of the scheme contained in the volume, _In Darkest
England_, clearly recognized the advisability of keeping the bounty-fed
products of the Salvation Colonies from competition in the market with
the products of outsid