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
