develop, afford facilities for washing, clothes-mending, and for non-alcoholic refreshments to persons who are attending them.  Separate provision will be made for men and for women, and for skilled and for unskilled labour.  Boy labour will be dealt with in conjunction with the local Education Authorities; and travelling expenses may be advanced on loan, if the management of the Exchange think fit, to persons for whom situations have been found.

So much for the policy of Labour Exchanges.  That is a policy complete in itself.  It would be considerable if it stood alone; but it does not stand alone.  As my right hon. friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced in his Budget speech, the Government propose to associate with the policy of Labour Exchanges a system of Unemployment Insurance.

The House knows that the Minority Report advocates a system of compulsory labour exchanges, that no person shall engage any man for less than a month except through a Labour Exchange.  That is not the proposal we are making.  We are making a proposal of voluntary Labour Exchanges.  I am quite ready to admit that no system of voluntary Labour Exchanges can deal adequately with the evils and difficulties of casual labour; but there is one conclusive reason against compulsory Labour Exchanges at the present time.  To establish a system of compulsory Labour Exchanges in order to eliminate casual labour, and so to divide among a certain proportion of workers all available employment, would be absolutely and totally to cast out at the other end a surplus of unemployed:  and to do this before preparations have been made for dealing with that surplus, would be to court an administrative breakdown which could not fail to be attended with the gravest possible disaster.  Until poor law reform has made further progress, to establish a compulsory system of Labour Exchanges would only increase and not diminish the miseries with which we are seeking to cope.

We have, therefore, decided that our system of labour exchanges shall be voluntary in its character.  For that very reason there is a great danger, to which I have never shut my eyes, that the highest ranks of labour, skilled workers, members of strong trade unions, would not think it necessary to use the Exchanges, but would use the very excellent apparatus which they have established themselves; that therefore this expensive system of Exchanges which we are calling into being would come to be used only by the poorest of the workers in the labour market, and, consequently, would gradually relapse and fall back into the purely distress machinery and non-economic machinery from which we are labouring to extricate and separate it.  It is for that reason, quite apart from the merits of the scheme of unemployment insurance, that the Government are very anxious to associate with their system of Labour Exchanges a system of unemployed insurance.  If Labour Exchanges depend for their effective initiation and establishment upon unemployment insurance being associated with them, it is equally true to say that no scheme of unemployment insurance can be worked except in conjunction with some apparatus for finding work and testing willingness to work, like Labour Exchanges.  The two systems are complementary; they are man and wife; they mutually support and sustain each other.