24 
individual sufferer but, so far as may be practicable, the 
prevention of the disease itself. At present there is no attempt 
to prevent the occurrence of Unemployment, the turning off 
of men, and the losing of situations. 
Unemployment is not merely a question of good trade or 
bad. We must not allow the question to be shunted be 
cause trade is improving. We find at all times, a considerable 
number of families in need of the necessaries of life, owing 
to the breadwinner being thrown out of work. At particular 
seasons of every year, and at particular places the number of 
such cases doubles and quadruples; and many who were before 
merely in distress sink gradually into destitution, and in 
some cases into habitual pauperism. But, whether moment 
arily greater or smaller, this continual losing of situations 
and consequent interruption of wages involves, on the one 
hand, great national waste of productive power, and, on the 
other, a vast amount of personal suffering and physical and 
mental degeneration. 
The evil, declares the Minority Report, can be stopped. 
This perpetual creation of Unemployment can be prevented in 
the same sense, and probably to the same extent, as we have 
already prevented cholera and typhus. If it continues, it is 
because Parliament and the Government have not chosen to 
prevent it. To put a stop to it is of all national problems the 
most urgent; of all political questions the most practical. It 
must be forced on every candidate for Parliament. It must 
be pressed, without respite, on every Cabinet. 
REGULARISE THE DEMAND. 
Now the first step to preventing Unemployment is to 
regularise the national aggregate demand for labour year by 
year. If this aggregate demand is less one year than another, 
whatever may he our system of Government or taxation, some 
men must be thrown out of work, whatever we may do for 
them when they have been thrown out. The Minority Report 
proposes that the National Government, which already spends 
more than a hundred millions a year on works and services, 
should deliberately rearrange that part which is not urgent, 
in such a way as to give out its orders more when trade is 
beginning to slacken, instead of evenly year by year. Parlia 
ment has already admitted this principle, by telling the 
Development Commission and the Road Board to act on it. 
This is how all the schemes of afforestation and land re 
clamation, road making, and agricultural development ought 
to come in—not. as relief works to be done by the unemployed, 
but by serving as a counterpoise to the great trade fluctua 
tions ; actually to prevent the occurrence of Unemployment. 
It is for the Government in this way to prevent that periodi-