any event individual cases to be dealt with, each on its own merits, after detailed inquiry into the special circumstances of the case.  That is the function which the Guardians are fitted to perform, and it is a most important function, which will still have to be discharged by the Guardians, or by similar local bodies, whatever the national system of unemployment relief may be.  But for dealing with unemployment wholesale, for paying relief in accordance with a fixed scale and without regard to individual circumstances—­for that work the Guardians are a most inappropriate body.  They possess no qualification for it which the Central Government does not possess, while they have some special and serious disqualifications.

In any case, it is preposterous that you should have two agencies, each relieving the same people in the same wholesale way, the Employment Exchanges with their scale, asking whether a man is unemployed, and how many children he has to support, and paying him so much, and the Guardians with their scale, asking only the same questions and paying him so much more.  It would obviously be simpler, more economical, and more satisfactory in every way, if one or other of those agencies paid the man the whole sum.  And I have no hesitation in saying that that agency should be the Central Government.  Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of that course is that, when relief is given locally, the money must be raised by one of the worst taxes in the whole of our fiscal system, local rates, which are tantamount to a tax, in many districts exceeding 100 per cent., upon erection of houses and buildings generally.  It is foolish to imagine that any useful end is served by keeping down taxes at the expense of rates.

Serious as is the problem of national finance, the fiscal resources of the Central Government are still far more elastic and less objectionable than those which the local authorities possess.  I suggest, accordingly, as a policy for the immediate future, the raising of the scale of national relief to a more adequate level, coupled with the abolition of what I have termed wholesale outdoor relief in the localities.  What it is right to pay on a uniform scale should be paid entirely by the Central Government, and local outdoor relief should be restricted to its proper function of the alleviation of cases of exceptional distress after special inquiries into the individual circumstances of each case.

One final word to prevent misconception.  I have said that our present system of relief is unsatisfactory, and I have indicated certain respects in which I think it could be improved.  But I am far from complaining that relief is being granted throughout the country as a whole upon too generous a scale.  Anomalies there are which, if they continued indefinitely, would prove intolerable.  But we have been passing through an unparalleled emergency.  Unemployment in the last two years has been far more widespread and intense