48  THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  UNEMPLOYED

work,  or  in  supposing  that  moral  and  technical  education
will  help  directly  either  to  prevent  or  cure  unemployment.
It  is  perhaps  almost  inevitable  that  those  who  are
absorbed  in  work  amongst  the  poor  should  often  be  dupes
of  this  individualist  fallacy.  Personal  defects  commonly
appear  as  direct  and  sufficient  reasons  why  A  or  B  or
C  fail  to  get  regular  work,  and  if  Society  at  large  is
regarded  merely  as  a  conglomerate  of  particular  instances
of  A  and  B  and  C,  these  personal  defects  appear  to
furnish  a  sufficient  explanation  of  the  total  amount  of
poverty  or  of  unemployment  in  the  whole  society.  But
this  conclusion,  very  natural  to  those  immersed  in  detailed
cases,  and  unable  to  see  the  forest  for  the  trees,  ignores
utterly  the  interrelations  of  the  various  individuals  and
the  organic  unity  which  they  express.  Regarded  as  furnishing ­
  an  explanation  of  “unemployment,”  it  rests  upon  a
total  denial  of  the  operation  of  wider  economic  forces
determining  the  quantity  of  employment  available  at  a
given  time  for  a  working  community.  If  it  is  true,  as
all  students  of  economics  assert,  that  there  are  forces
operating  from  without  which  are  liable  to  cause  a  shrinkage ­
  of  employment  in  the  woollen  or  the  iron  trade,
amounting  to  (say)  30  per  cent,  of  the  former  volume  of
employment,  it  is  idle  for  those  who,  working  as  philanthropists, ­
  shut  their  eyes  to  these  economic  forces,  to
adduce  as  causes  of  “  the  unemployment”  those  personal
causes  which  merely  decide  whether  A  or  B  or  C  among
the  workers  shall  be  among  the  30  per  cent,  unemployed.
It  has  been  necessary  to  emphasise  this  point  because
the  grasp  of  an  organic  conception  of  industrial  life  and  its
necessary  implications  is  still  very  weak,  and  the  notion
that  investigation  which  confines  itself  to  particular  instances