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PREFACE

The  Unemployed  Question  has  greatly  suffered  from  the
modern  tendency  of  economic  investigation  in  England
to  devote  an  almost  exclusive  attention  to  the  study  of
detailed  facts,  ignoring  the  larger  facts  or  principles  in
which  these  smaller  facts  find  their  unity.  It  may  be
readily  conceded  that  the  treatment  of  no  industrial  subject
has  suffered  more  than  this  from  vague  and  unfounded
generalities,  and  that  the  close  labour  of  historical  research
in  collecting  and  grouping  facts  is  a  most  urgent  need.
Such  work  to  be  effective  requires  a  separate  investigation
and  discussion  of  the  several  forms  and  aspects  of  Unemployment ­
  and  of  the  forces  which  are  engaged  in  causing
it-  So  the  Unemployed  Question  easily  bifurcates  into
the  treatment  of  skilled  and  unskilled,  able-bodied  and
inefficient,  temporarily  unemployed  and  surplus  labour,
country  and  town  labour,  while  each  trade  is  found  to
have  its  special  characters  and  causes  of  seasonal  irregularity
or  wider  fluctuations.
But  the  need  of  this  segmentary  search  for  facts  does
not  justify  the  common  suggestion  that  there  is  not  one
Unemployed  Problem  but  fifty,  and  that  each  must  be