problem at all. If there are not too many workmen in a country, every man who wants work must be able to obtain it. If any man fails to find room while all around him fresh room is opening up, he must be either unfit or unwilling to do so. He must be "unemployable," incompetent, lazy, sick, or infirm.

Yet unemployment is not to be explained away as the idleness of the unemployable. As little can it be treated as a collection of accidents to individual working people or individual firms. It is too widespread and too enduring for that. While the final absorption of the growing population in the growing industry is accepted as being for the country still happily the rule, it is no less necessary to admit the existence of facts modifying the completeness of this absorption at certain times and places-indeed, at all times and places. There is no general want of adjustment between the increase of the people and the expansion of industry, between the rate of supply of fresh labor and the normal growth of the demand for it. There are specific imperfections of adjustment which are the causes of unemployment.

One of these has long been recognized. While industry, as a whole, grows, specific trades may decay, or change in methods and organization. The men who have learned to live by those trades may find their peculiar and hard-won skill a drug on the market and themselves permanently displaced from their chosen occupations, while lacking both the youth and the knowledge to make their way in new occupations.

A second type of maladjustment between the demand for and the supply of labor is found in actual fluctuations in industrial activity. Many trades, perhaps most trades, pass regularly each year through an alternation of busy and slack seasons, determined by climate or social habits, or a combination of both. Building is slack in winter and busy in spring and summer. Printers find least to do in the August holidays and most in the season just before Christmas.

Behind and apart from these seasonal vicissitudes of special trades, and affecting, though in various degrees, nearly all trades at about the same time, is a cyclical fluctuation in which periods of general depression alternate at regular intervals with periods of feverish activity. At such times of depression the industrial system does appear to suffer a temporary loss of elasticity; it fails for a while to keep pace with the steady growth of population; it givesin a phase of falling wages and lowered standards-an object lesson of what might be expected if the supply of labor should ever come permanently to outstrip the demand.

These two elements in the problem of unemployment have long been familiar. A third, apparently far more important than either of the occasional transformations of industrial structure or the periodic fluctuations of industrial activity, is only just beginning to receive attention. This is the requirement in each trade of reserves of labor to meet the fluctuations of work incidental even to years of prosperity. The men forming these reserves are constantly passing in and out of employment. They tend, moreover, to be always more numerous than can find employment together at any one time. This tendency springs directly from one of the fundamental facts of industry-the dissipation of the demand for labor in each trade between many separate employers and centers of employment. Its result may be described as the normal glutting of the labor market. The counterpart of such glutting is the idleness at every moment of some or others of those engaged.

The three factors just mentioned-changes of industrial structure, fluctuations of industrial activity, and the reserve of labor represent, not indeed all, but at least the principal economic factors in unemployment.

258. Wanted: A Labor Exchange

BY GREGORY MASON

Mankind has been job hunting since the fall from grace in Eden. Even in normal times, say statisticians, from 3 to 10 per cent of the laboring population is out of work. In periods of depression the percentage is much larger. None but the wildest theorists think all unemployment will be done away with this side of the millennium, but more and more people are coming to feel that the number of jobless men and women in the United States can be greatly reduced by the injection of a little system into the situation. This feeling is justified by the fact that no matter how hard times may be there is always a number of jobs waiting to be filled.

At present in this country men and women find jobs through four mediums: newspapers, private employment agencies, charitable organizations, and undirected search. None of these mediums is satisfactory because none of them is broad enough to be in touch with the whole demand and the whole supply. A commission reported not long ago that "a surprising amount of unemployment within our

"Adapted from "The Jobless Man and the State," in Harper's Weekly. March 28, 1914. Copyright.

own state, over the country as a whole, and even in one city, is due to mere failure of the demand for labor and the supply to connect up."

In other words, a good deal of unemployment in the United States is due to the absence in most states of a centralized labor market. Labor is as much a commodity as cotton, steel, or oil, and these commodities all have their central markets. When a man wants to buy cotton he goes to a cotton exchange. No one ever saw advertised "cotton wanted" or "oil wanted," yet the "help wanted" sign is in a thousand windows in the country, a symbol of inefficiency and waste.

Sixty years ago the Germans, whose social instinct is deeper than ours, decided that the bringing together of work and workers was a proper function of the state. Then was begun a great system of public labor exchanges which now fills annually more than a million jobs and makes the lot of the jobless man easier in Germany than in any other country.

Ohio in 1890 was the first American state to follow the lead of the Germans. Employment offices were opened in five large cities in the state. The experiment was a success, and other states began to try it, timidly at first, but more boldly and in increasing numbers during the last decade, until there are now nineteen states with sixty-one public employment bureaus in the United States.

These state labor bureaus charge no fee for their services, allot jobs impartially-usually distributing them in the order in which applications are made—and undertake not to give work to anyone, but merely to introduce laborers looking for work to employers looking for labor. They have won the approval of trade unions by maintaining a neutral attitude in strikes. Their most important function consists in regulating the distribution of labor over an entire state. Where the outlook of a private employment bureau is local, a state bureau has a bird's-eye view of the entire state and bevond. For instance, in Wisconsin, where the system is more highly developed than elsewhere, a working man can tell by a glance at the monthly labor bulletin whether the demand for lumberjacks exceeds that for farm hands and in what part of the state the lumberjack demand is the strongest. As soon as a man is out of work he goes to one of the state employment agencies and learns in what locality he is most likely to find a purchaser for his labor.

In America we need a system of free public labor exchanges in every state as well conducted as those in Wisconsin, and co-ordinated by a central bureau at Washington. The latter is needed because unemployment is essentially a national question, and the

power of the state in directing the stream of labor stops at the state boundaries. Such a central labor office, keeping an all-embracing eye on the labor market in America and moving the supply of labor from one state to meet the demand in another has been advocated by the labor commissioners of a number of states which already supply free labor brokerage to their inhabitants.

It would be the task of such a central bureau to keep labor evenly distributed, removing the usual surplus from large cities to the labor-hungry districts of the country. Such a central bureau could also minimize the evil effects of seasonal employment, for example, by shifting the labor that is left idle in agricultural states after the harvest to localities where there is ice or timber to be cut or other winter work to be done.

Surely it is not revolutionary to propose that a government that dispenses to its citizens information on subjects ranging from crops to first-aid-to-the-injured should take a hand in bringing together the man and job.

259. Cyclical Distribution of Government Orders"

BY SIDNEY AND BEATRICE WEBB

Without securing an approximate uniformity, one year with another, in the aggregate demand for labor in the community as a whole, it is clear that unemployment on a large scale cannot be prevented. The only possible way in which that uniformity can be secured is the use of the government orders as a counterpoise to the uncontrollable fluctuations in the other orders. If this involved the stopping of all government orders in good years and doing all the government work in bad years, the proposal would be an impracticable one, because the government business must go on continuously, whatever the state of the labor market. But if the desired result can be achieved by rearranging, within the decade, no more than 3 or 4, or even 6 or 8 per cent of the work that would otherwise have been done evenly year by year. It is impossible to believe that so relatively small a readjustment is not possible.

It may be asked how this policy differs from that of relief works now so universally condemned. In reality the two policies are poles. asunder. What gives to relief works their evil character, whether or not they are of any real public utility, and whatever rate of wages

Adapted from The Prevention of Destitution, 114-118. Published by Longmans, Green & Co. (1911).

is paid, is that the men employed are taken on because they are unemployed. Accordingly, relief works are of the nature of relief, not prevention. They do not prevent the occurrence of unemployment; they do not prevent that breach of continuity in the workman's industrial life which is so harmful to him. They merely come in, by way of succour, after the breach of continuity has occurred. And by having to take on only those men who have already been thrown out of work, and taking them on because they have been thrown out of work, the managers of relief works find themselves necessarily saddled with a heterogeneous crowd of workmen, who are not individually picked out for employment because their specific services are required, in exactly due proportions to each other; but are taken en bloc, whatever their several qualifications and antecedents, just because they happen, at that particular time and place, to be together unemployed. Now it is characteristic of any enterprise of remunerative character that it involves a high degree of organization, division of labor, the employment of the various grades and kinds of workers required in a certain exact proportion one to another, and so on. The result is not being able, on relief work, to pick exactly the men having the skill and antecedents that are required, and of having, instead, to take on a heterogeneous crowd, is that no industrial enterprise of any highly organized character can possibly be undertaken, and the work accordingly can hardly ever be remunerative, or form part of normal productive industry.

But it is not so much in the extravagant cost, or in the wastefulness, or in the lack of real utility that the evil of relief work lies. It is in their bad effect upon the character of the men whom they are intended to succor. The taking on of the heterogeneous crowd, not to work each of them at his own trade, for his own standard rate, but to labor at some common occupation that can simultaneously find employment for them all; which is known to have been undertaken merely to give them employment, from which they cannot practically be dismissed; and where they receive wages at a rate arbitrarily fixed, to a view of what they can live on rather than to the market rate for any particular kind of labor, inevitably has an adverse psychological reaction on the men themselves and on the foremen over them.

Now contrast this with the proposal to give to the government orders for works and services unevenly, and more in the lean years,