traction. There is a plain need of some averaging
machinery to regulate and even-up the general course of the labour
market, in the same way as the Bank of England, by its bank rate,
regulates and corrects the flow of business enterprise. When the
extent of the depression is foreseen, the extent of the relief should
also be determined. There ought to be in permanent existence certain
recognised industries of a useful, but uncompetitive character, like,
we will say, afforestation, managed by public departments, and capable
of being expanded or contracted according to the needs of the labour
market, just as easily as you can pull out the stops or work the
pedals of an organ. In this way, you would not eliminate unemployment,
you certainly would not prevent the creation of unemployables; but you
would considerably limit the scale of unemployment, you would reduce
the oscillation of the industrial system, you would increase its
stability, and by every step that you took in that direction you would
free thousands of your fellow-countrymen from undeserved agony and
ruin, and a far greater number from the haunting dread of ruin. That
is the first point--a gap, a hiatus in our social organisation--to
which I direct your attention to-night, and upon which the
intelligence of this country ought to be concentrated.

The second vicious condition is positive and not negative. I mean the
gross, and, I sometimes fear, increasing evil of casual labour. We
talk a great deal about the unemployed, but the evil of the
_under-employed_ is the tap-root of unemployment. There is a tendency
in many trades, almost in all trades, to have a fringe of casual
labour on hand, available as a surplus whenever there is a boom, flung
back into the pool whenever there is a slump. Employers and foremen in
many trades are drawn consciously or unconsciously to distribute their
work among a larger number of men than they regularly require, because
this obviously increases their bargaining power with them, and
supplies a convenient reserve for periods of brisk business activity.

And what I desire to impress upon you, and through you upon this
country, is that the casual unskilled labourer who is habitually
under-employed, who is lucky to get three, or at the outside four,
days' work in the week, who may often be out of a job for three or
four weeks at a time, who in bad times goes under altogether, and who
in good times has no hope of security and no incent