ghteen or nineteen, the mass of the nation runs
wild after fourteen years of age. No doubt at first employment is easy
to obtain. There is a wide and varied field; there are a hundred odd
jobs for a lad; but almost every form of employment now open to young
persons affords them no opening, is of no use to them whatever when
they are grown up, and in a great number of cases the life which they
lead is demoralising and harmful. And what is the consequence? The
consequence may be measured by this grim fact, that out of the
unemployed applying for help under the Unemployed Workmen Act, no less
than twenty-eight per cent. are between twenty and thirty years of
age, that is to say, men in the first flush of their strength and
manhood already hopelessly adrift on the dark and tumultuous ocean of
life. Upon this subject, I say to you deliberately that no boy or girl
ought to be treated merely as cheap labour, that up to eighteen years
of age every boy and girl in this country should, as in the old days
of apprenticeship, be learning a trade as well as earning a living.

All attempts to deal with these and similar evils involve the
expenditure of money. It is no use abusing capitalists and rich
people. They are neither worse nor better than any one else. They
function quite naturally under the conditions in which they find
themselves. When the conditions are vicious, the consequence will be
evil; when the conditions are reformed, the evil will be abated. Nor
do I think the wealthy people of Great Britain would be ungenerous or
unwilling to respond to the plain need of this nation for a more
complete or elaborate social organisation. They would have a natural
objection to having public money wasted or spent on keeping in
artificial ease an ever-growing class of wastrels and ne'er-do-weels.
No doubt there would also be a selfish element who would sullenly
resist anything which touched their pocket. But I believe that if
large schemes, properly prepared and scientifically conceived for
dealing with the evils I have mentioned were presented, and if it
could be shown that our national life would be placed upon a far more
stable and secure foundation, I believe that there would be thousands
of rich people who would cheerfully make the necessary sacrifices. At
any rate, we shall see.

The year that lies before us must be a year of important finance. No
doubt that finance will be a subject of fierce and protracted
discussion; but I sh