e
aiding those who have, thank God, been most able to aid themselves,
without at the same time assisting those who hitherto, under existing
conditions, have not been able to make any effective provision.

To what trades ought we, as a beginning, to apply this system of
compulsory contributory unemployment insurance? There is a group of
trades specially marked out for the operation of such a policy. They
are trades in which unemployment is not only high, but chronic, for
even in the best of times it persists; in which it is not only high
and chronic, but marked by seasonal and cyclical fluctuations, and in
which, wherever and howsoever it occurs, it takes the form not of
short time or of any of those devices for spreading wages and
equalising or averaging risks, but of a total, absolute, periodical
discharge of a certain proportion of the workers. The group of trades
which we contemplate to be the subject of our scheme are these:
house-building, and works of construction, engineering, machine-and
tool-making, ship-building and boat-building, making of vehicles, and
mill-sawing.

That is a very considerable group of industries. They comprise,
probably at the present time, 21/4 millions of adult males. Two and a
quarter millions of adult males are, roughly speaking, one-third of
the population of these three kingdoms engaged in purely industrial
work; that is to say, excluding commercial, professional,
agricultural, and domestic occupations. Of the remaining two-thirds of
the industrial population, nearly one-half are employed in the textile
trades, in mining, on the railways, in the merchant marine, and in
other trades, which either do not present the same features of
unemployment which we see in these precarious trades, or which, by the
adoption of short time or other arrangements, avoid the total
discharge of a proportion of workmen from time to time. So that this
group of trades to which we propose to apply the system of
unemployment insurance, roughly speaking, covers very nearly half of
the whole field of unemployment; and that half is, on the whole,
perhaps the worse half.

The financial and actuarial basis of the scheme has been very
carefully studied by the light of all available information. The
report of the actuarial authorities whom I have consulted leaves me in
no doubt that, even after all allowance has been made for the fact
that unemployment may be more rife in the less organised and less
highly skill