Those we may
discuss at our leisure later. I confine myself only to a few general
observations. Two main defects in modern industrial conditions which
were emphasised by the Royal Commission were the lack of mobility of
labour and lack of information. With both of these defects the
National System of Labour Exchanges is calculated to deal. Modern
industry has become national. Fresh means of transport knit the
country into one, as it was never knit before. Labour alone in its
search for markets has not profited; the antiquated, wasteful, and
demoralising method of personal application--that is to say, the
hawking of labour--persists. Labour Exchanges will give labour for the
first time a modernised market. Labour Exchanges, in the second place,
will increase and will organise the mobility of labour. But let me
point out that to increase the _mobility_ of labour is not necessarily
to increase the _movement_ of labour. Labour Exchanges will not
increase the movement of labour; they will only render that movement,
when it has become necessary, more easy, more smooth, more painless,
and less wasteful.

Labour Exchanges do not pretend to any large extent to create new
employment. Their main function will be to organise the existing
employment, and by organising the existing employment to reduce the
friction and wastage, resulting from changes in employment and the
movement of workers, to a minimum. By so doing they will necessarily
raise the general economic standard of our industrial life.

So far as the second defect, "lack of information," is concerned, a
system of Labour Exchanges promises to be of the highest value. In
proportion as they are used, they will give absolutely contemporary
information upon the tendencies of the demand for labour, both in
quality and in quantity, as between one trade and another, as between
one season and another, as between one cycle and another, and as
between one part of the country and another. They will tell the worker
where to go for employment. They will tell him, what is scarcely less
important, where it is useless to go in search of employment. Properly
co-ordinated and connected with the employment bureaux of the various
education authorities, which are now coming into existence in Scotland
and in England, they will afford an increasing means of guiding the
new generation into suitable, promising, and permanent employment, and
will divert them from overstocked or declining indust