in the labour market. The conditions are very similar at the present moment. Then we had a mass of "unemployed" centring round the parish pay-tables and claiming parish work and parish allowances. Now, we have similar apparently "stagnant pools" of labour besieging the doors of Distress Committees and Borough Council offices. We have in addition huge centralised charities providing relief work and free meals, which make the problem even more acute. Then, as now, we had an alleged surplus of labour which did not disappear till outdoor relief to the able-bodied was cut off and wages were no longer supplemented.
Artificial Exclusion from the Labour Market.
But, assuming for the moment that this surplus of labour is a fact, we have to consider how the Minority propose to deal with it. First, they would endeavour to reduce it by the exclusion of certain classes of labour from the labour market. Women with young children would be provided with adequate outdoor relief on condition that they did no work. The school age would be raised to fifteen, and young people up to eighteen would be only allowed to work thirty hours a week. We can hardly contemplate with equanimity the number of inspectors that would be required to enforce such a policy. We may doubt, judging from the Scottish experiment of giving "adequate relief" to widows in order to keep them out of the labour market,[1] and indeed from much experience in out-relief adminis-
- ↑ "A considerable number of these widows fell into bad habits, became drunken, and otherwise unsatisfactory, and had to be struck off the roll. … So many of the women are devoid of domestic and other interests that work for wages is a positive safeguard. How they are to be taught to care wisely for their homes and their children, and to spend their relief to the best advantage, is a problem which this scheme has not solved."—Majority Report, Part IV., chap. 6, 275.
