UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 125

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thus to show you that the President’s Conference on Unemployment,
the subcommittee which is appointed under the chairmanship of
Mr. Young, merely indorsed its conclusions and recommendations;
the Senate committee that went into this subject for several months
under the chairmanship of Mr. Couzens made the report to which I
call your attention here, and while I have only read extracts from it to
you an examination of the report by you will show that over and over
and over again it emphasizes the fact, first, that the employers in the
respective communities are the sources of employment, and that any
System which is proposed should have their support and cooperation
and confidence or it can not work. And I regret to say that when this
bill was before the Senate Committee on Commerce, although we
made an application to be heard, the hearings closed when the case
for the proponents was presented, and we had no opportunity to
Present our case except through the brief which we asked the Senate
Committee on Commerce to then permit us to file. So that we had
not the opportunity that this committee has so graciously accorded us.
. I want to show to you, Mr. Chairman, if I may, the serious defects
In the plan that is presented from the standpoint of our traditional
System of government; that it undertakes to set up, not a voluntary
but a corecive method of forcing the States into the adoption of a
Federal policy. Now, the moment that the director general of
employment is given the authority to fix the regulatory conditions
under which all the bureaus, local in their nature, must operate in
order to avail themselves of Federal aid, the State is surrendering in
returning from a Federal appropriation the development of its own
policy in this respect, which you could not take from it but which it
must adopt and make its own policy if it wants your aid and assistanre.

And finally, not satisfied with the endeavor to secure voluntary
action in this respect, it has undertaken by coercive action, by the
threat that it will establish competing agencies or that it will deal
with the governor where the legislature does not undertake to act, it
has practically said to the state: “Either adopt our policy, even
though you have in 25 States in the Union an established system of
employment-—adopt our policy or we have the authority to establish
i competing or conflicting agency under our direction, with the
great resources of the Federal Government behind it.”
Now, gentlemen, apart from this question of law, apart from the
Serious objections to this tremendous endeavor to carry the Federal
Government further into this policy I suggest that that is not the
the best method of approaching this subject; that if this subject is to
receive the support of all the great sources of private employment in
the United States, it must be presented to them with all the local
agencies cooperating under local government and local policy and
State authority, in order to enlist that assistance and cooperation.
No one remotely in Washington is capable of directing and regulating
Internal and local affairs of States with respect to a problem as
delicate and as far-reaching as this, and you have only to touch the
Outskirts, of it to realize how many complicated questions are presented.
 It was said in respect to technological employment, for
example, that the establishment of new labor saving devices was
throwing men out of their jobs and making difficult questions of
adjustment. That is partly true, but it is not peculiar to employers
alone; it is peculiar to all industry.