work. This, of course, involves the assumption that all the jobs offering can be registered at the labour exchange, a thing which is inconceivable. Many thousands of labourers now tide over their times of unemployment for themselves by street selling and other quite legitimate ways of earning a living. Thousands of men, who have reached honourable and even distinguished positions, have had in their day to resort to all sorts of shifts and devices to tide themselves over difficulties—shifts and devices which could figure in no labour exchange, however complete. We have heard of writers, who have afterwards become great, who have had to sweep a crossing. We have heard of "captains of industry" who have had similar experience of one kind or another, yet they have "worried through" by grit and self-reliance. Yet these, one and all, could under the Minority proposals claim at the first check in their career to be maintained in a training establishment, because there might be nothing offering for them at the labour exchange. The Minority point out to us with regard to insurance against unemployment that "the power to draw out-of-work pay may, by its subtle play upon motive, tend insidiously to slacken the effort to obtain another job" (p. 1143); and, again, that the labourers before 1834, "secure of subsistence, lowered the quality and quantity of their effort" (p. 1038). What, then, would be the result of "honourable" maintenance and "secure subsistence" in a training establishment with mental arithmetic, organised recreation, physical drill, and the rest? What would have been the fate of many men who have succeeded after a life of struggle, if at some critical moment in their lives they had been relegated to a training establishment, whilst their wives and families received "adequate home aliment"?
