About five years ago I had the opportunity of witnessing at very close quarters the working of an unemployment scheme on an industrial basis.  The great Lancashire cotton industry was faced during the war with a very serious unemployment problem, owing to the difficulty of transporting sufficient cotton from America.  It met that situation with a scheme of unemployment relief, devised and administered by one of those war Control Boards, which in this case was essentially a representative joint committee of employers and employed.  The money was raised, every penny of it, from the employers in the industry itself; the Cotton Control Board laid down certain rules and regulations as to the scale of benefits, and the conditions entitling a worker to receive it; and the task of applying those rules and paying the money out was entrusted to the trade unions.

Well, I was in a good position to watch that experiment.  I do not think I am a particularly credulous person, or one prone to indulge in easy enthusiasms, and I certainly don’t believe in painting a fairy picture in glowing colours by way of being encouraging.  But I say deliberately that there has never been an unemployment scheme in this country or in any other country which has worked with so little abuse, with so few anomalies, with so little demoralisation to any one, and at the same time which has met so adequately the needs of a formidable situation, or given such general satisfaction all round as that Cotton Control Board scheme.

I cannot describe as fully as I should like to do the various features which made that scheme attractive, and made it a success.  I will take just one by way of illustration.  It is technically possible in the cotton trade to work the mills with relays of workers, so that if a mill has 100 work-people, and can only employ 80 work-people each week, the whole 100 can work each for four weeks out of the five, and “play off,” as it is called, in regular sequence for the fifth week.  And that was what was done for a long time.  It was called the “rota” system; and the “rota” week of “playing off” became a very popular institution.  Under that system, benefits which would have been far from princely as the sole source of income week after week—­they never amounted to more than 30/- for a man and 18/- for a woman—­assumed a much more liberal aspect.  For they came only as the occasional variants of full wages; and they were accompanied not by the depressing circumstances of long-continued unemployment, but by what is psychologically an entirely different and positively exhilarating thing, a full week’s holiday.  That meant that the available resources—­and one of the difficulties of any scheme of unemployment relief is that the resources available are always limited—­did much more to prevent misery and distress, and went much further towards fulfilling all the objects of an unemployment scheme than would have been possible otherwise.