26 
“dovetailing” the seasonal trades necessarily involves squeez 
ing out, once for all, the unnecessary surplus of labourers who 
now compete for part of the work. In fact, nothing can be 
done in this direction until this surplus is assured that it will 
be at once provided for. In addition, there will always be the 
odds and ends of men dropping out of place for one reason or 
another, the weak men, the irregular men, the men who have 
“words” with the foreman, and so on. There would, even 
under a Socialist Government owning all the means of produc 
tion, be the men displaced by a new machine or a new process. 
Thus, it is certainly not sufficient to provide a National Labour 
Exchange: it is not sufficient to start a scheme of Insurance. 
There will still be unemployed men to be provided for; and 
they cannot nowadays be thrust back into the Poor Law. 
The Government must not be allowed to shirk this part of the 
problem. To regularise employment, to give every labourer 
who is employed at all nearly a full week’s work every week 
of the year—an inestimable boon—involves a sort of surgical 
operation. We cannot do it without taking care to find places 
for the men who will be, once for all, squeezed out. The 
Minority Report shows how it can be done—by “halving” boy 
and girl labour and insisting on half-time instruction up to 
eighteen, by reducing excessive hours on railways and tram 
ways, and by enabling widows with young children to abstain 
from industrial work. 
THE RIGHT TO WORK. 
Rut there are some for whom provision must be made at 
all times, the odds and ends of men who drop out, from this 
trade or that, for this reason or that—we need not inquire 
why, for they cannot be allowed to starve, and it is the worst 
of all policies to let them be demoralised or brutalised by the 
Poor Law. For these, and indeed for all men who are un 
employed and in distress from whatever cause, as we must 
necessarily provide maintenance, we ought to provide some 
useful occupation, some educational work. This, to my mind, 
is the proper meaning of the “Right to Work.” We don’t 
need to set these men to produce more commodities for ex 
change, because this is apt in practice to mean “doing another 
man out of his job.” We had better let the work to which we 
put them be educational in its character. For such men the 
Minority Report proposes that there should stand always open 
the Minister of Labour’s Educational Training Establish 
ments, day or residential. These provisions would be 
made for a man (or a woman), for whose work there 
was, from one end of the kingdom to the other, 
on the testimony of the National Labour Exchange 
itself, temporarily no demand ; the man (or woman) meanwhile 
getting full maintenance whilst under training, with allowance