surance against unemployment
which I hope to have the honour of passing through Parliament next
year. The details of that scheme are practically complete, and it will
enable upwards of two and a quarter millions of workers in the most
uncertain trades of this country--trades like ship-building,
engineering, and building--to secure unemployment benefits, which in a
great majority of cases will be sufficient to tide them over the
season of unemployment. This scheme in its compulsory form is limited
to certain great trades like those I have specified, but it will be
open to other trades, to trade unions, to workers' associations of
various kinds, or even to individuals to insure with the State
Unemployment Insurance Office against unemployment on a voluntary
basis, and to secure, through the State subvention, much better terms
than it would be possible for them to obtain at the present time.

It would be impossible to work a scheme of unemployment insurance
except in conjunction with some effective method of finding work and
of testing willingness to work, and that can only be afforded by a
national system of labour exchanges. That Bill has already passed
through Parliament, and in the early months of next year we shall hope
to bring it into operation by opening, all over the country, a network
of labour exchanges connected with each other and with the centre by
telephone. We believe this organisation may secure for labour--and,
after all, labour is the only thing the great majority of people have
to sell--it will secure for labour, for the first time, that free and
fair market which almost all other commodities of infinitely less
consequence already enjoy, and will replace the present wasteful,
heartbreaking wanderings aimlessly to and fro in search of work by a
scientific system; and we believe that the influence of this system in
the end must tend to standardising the conditions of wages and
employment throughout the country.

Lastly, in connection with unemployment I must direct your attention
to the Development Bill, which is now before Parliament, the object of
which is to provide a fund for the economic development of our
country, for the encouragement of agriculture, for afforestation, for
the colonisation of England, and for the making of roads, harbours,
and other public works. And I should like to draw your attention to a
very important clause in that Bill, which says that the prosecution of
these works shall