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Perhaps it is because the unemployed are more liberally relieved now than they were at first. I know that now many who have concealed their starving condition are ferreted out and relieved as far as possible. Many of these street wanderers have gone home again disgusted, to pinch out the hard time in proud obscurity; and there are some, no doubt, who have wandered away to other parts of England.
In 1908 only 20,000 emigrants left our country; further, according to the statistics of the workmen's unions, only 4.4 per cent, of their members were unemployed, whereas in the same year 336,000 persons emigrated from Great Britain and 10 per cent. Against this brilliant prosperity must be placed a very large national debt, both in the Empire and in the separate States.
But a people unemployed, and gaunt with hunger, face a situation quite as disheartening as war, and our greater obligation to-day is to do the Government's part toward resuming productivity and promoting fortunate and remunerative employment. Something more than tariff protection is required by American agriculture. To the farmer has come the earlier and the heavier burdens of readjustment.
The peasant and his dame are on terms of equality equality even of ambition: no career is open to one and shut to the other; equality even of hardship, and hardship is employment: no labour occupies the whole energies of the man, but leaves those of the woman unemployed. Is this the case with the wives in a higher station? the wives of the lawyer, the merchant, the senator, the noble?
The reckless and the gay, younger sons, soldiers unemployed, and students from the inns of court, early sought advancement and adventure in the more southern provinces, where slaves offered impunity from labor, and where war, with a bolder and more stirring policy, oftener gave rise to scenes of excitement, and, of course, to the exercise of the faculties best suited to their habits and dispositions.
It is the policy of England to fill every workshop in her tight little island before she permits business to overflow. To-day there are no unemployed in Great Britain, except in the cotton districts dependent upon German trade. Wage advances and overtime are the rule rather than the exception.
Say that a man attends but fifteen dinners daily, that is seventy-five guineas, or five hundred and fifty pounds weekly, or fourteen thousand three hundred pounds for a season of six months: and how many of our younger sons have such a capital even? Let, then, some unemployed gentleman with the requisite qualifications come forward.
Almost her only recreation was a meeting of the working-girls, a session of her labor lodge, or an assembly at the Cooper Union, where some fiery orator, perhaps a priest, or a clever agitator, a working-man glib of speech, who had a mass of statistics at the end of his tongue, who read and discussed, in some private club of zealots of humanity, metaphysics, psychology, and was familiar with the whole literature of labor and socialism, awoke the enthusiasm of the discontented or the unemployed, and where men and women, in clear but homely speech, told their individual experiences of wrong and injustice.
Hundreds of factories and workshops are stopped. The short-sighted policy of the Commissaries has caused hundreds of workmen to be thrown on the streets and become unemployed. The will of the entire people is threatened with being violated.
All this was the result of a resolution on the part of the chief to leave no proper means unemployed, in order to get transferred to his own nation the greatest hunter that was then thought to exist in all that region, as well as a husband for a woman who he felt would be likely to be troublesome, were any of her claims to the attention and care of the tribe overlooked.
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