lic refreshments to persons who are attending them. Separate
provision will be made for men and for women, and for skilled and for
unskilled labour. Boy labour will be dealt with in conjunction with
the local Education Authorities; and travelling expenses may be
advanced on loan, if the management of the Exchange think fit, to
persons for whom situations have been found.

So much for the policy of Labour Exchanges. That is a policy complete
in itself. It would be considerable if it stood alone; but it does not
stand alone. As my right hon. friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer
has announced in his Budget speech, the Government propose to
associate with the policy of Labour Exchanges a system of Unemployment
Insurance.

The House knows that the Minority Report advocates a system of
compulsory labour exchanges, that no person shall engage any man for
less than a month except through a Labour Exchange. That is not the
proposal we are making. We are making a proposal of voluntary Labour
Exchanges. I am quite ready to admit that no system of voluntary
Labour Exchanges can deal adequately with the evils and difficulties
of casual labour; but there is one conclusive reason against
compulsory Labour Exchanges at the present time. To establish a
system of compulsory Labour Exchanges in order to eliminate casual
labour, and so to divide among a certain proportion of workers all
available employment, would be absolutely and totally to cast out at
the other end a surplus of unemployed: and to do this before
preparations have been made for dealing with that surplus, would be to
court an administrative breakdown which could not fail to be attended
with the gravest possible disaster. Until poor law reform has made
further progress, to establish a compulsory system of Labour Exchanges
would only increase and not diminish the miseries with which we are
seeking to cope.

We have, therefore, decided that our system of labour exchanges shall
be voluntary in its character. For that very reason there is a great
danger, to which I have never shut my eyes, that the highest ranks of
labour, skilled workers, members of strong trade unions, would not
think it necessary to use the Exchanges, but would use the very
excellent apparatus which they have established themselves; that
therefore this expensive system of Exchanges which we are calling into
being would come to be used only by the poorest of the workers in the
labour market, and, conseq