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should tend to prevent the congestion of markets, and the
reason he supported the recommendations of the Minority
Report in regard to Unemployment was that he believed that
these proposals were not merely in the right direction, but
that they form a unified scheme of proposals which would do
more than any other practical proposals which he had seen
to put an end to the congestion of trade and the depression
and unemployment which ensued. If they were to work in
this direction, to achieve this desirable end, they could only
do it in one or other of three ways.
Either they must reduce the effective supply of labour or
they must increase the demand for labour, or they must
regularise that demand for labour.
The proposals of the Minority Report seemed to him to
reduce the over supply of labour in that they proposed to
remove large numbers of children and young persons from
competing "in the labour market, to reduce the competition
of married women, to remove certain elements of incompetence
at the bottom of all the trades, and otherwise, by taking out
of our industrial system large numbers of invalids and aged
people to reduce the chronic over-supply of labour
in the labour market. They would stimulate the demand for
commodities through taxing the superfluous wealth of
the rich and spending it in the name of the State in supply
ing work and wages. More important still would be the in
direct action of the scheme in improving the organisation of
the labour market. If they could remove those waste elements
from the competition of the labour market they would enable
every Trade Union to organise more effectively, and so raise
the general standard of wages.
Lastly, it would help to regularise the demand for labour,
partly because working-class expenditure would itself be more
regular than expenditure on luxuries, and partly because it
proposed to utilise the machine of State action in setting going
a current of public industry to counter-balance the irregular
action of private enterprise.
The chairman then called upon Sidney Webb, LL.B., to
read a paper on “The Organisation of the Labour Market.”
The paper submitted by Mr. Webb was as follows:—
The Minority Report makes a new departure in the Unem
ployed question. All previous proposals, whether by Munici
pal Authorities or philanthropists, have taken for granted the
continual existence of periodical Unemployment in mass; and
have dealt only with the relief of the workman when he had
become unemployed. This is even the common interpreta
tion of the Right to Work Bill, though I think that measure
capable of a wider scope. But the Minority Report goes a
step further. It declares this chronic Unemployment to be
a disease of society, demanding not merely tlie relief of the