So I come to Unemployment Insurance.  It is not practicable at the present time to establish a universal system of unemployment insurance.  We, therefore, have to choose at the very outset of this subject between insuring some workmen in all trades or all workmen in some.  In the first case we should have a voluntary, and in the second a compulsory system.  The risk of unemployment varies so much between one man and another owing to relative skill, character, demeanour, and other qualities, that any system of State-aided voluntary insurance is utilised mainly by those most liable to be unemployed, and, consequently, a preponderance of bad risks is established against the Insurance Office fatal to its financial stability.  On the other hand, a compulsory system of insurance, which did not add to the contribution of the worker a substantial contribution from outside, would almost certainly break down, because of the refusal of the higher class of worker to assume, unsupported, a share of the burden of the weaker members of the community.

We have decided to adopt the second alternative, and our insurance system will, in consequence, be based upon four main principles.  It will involve contributions from workmen and employers; it will receive a substantial subvention from the State; it will be organised by trades; it will be compulsory upon all—­employers and employed, skilled and unskilled, unionists and non-unionists alike—­within those trades.  The hon.  Member for Leicester[15] with great force showed that to confine a scheme of unemployment insurance merely to trade unionists would be trifling with the subject.  It would only be aiding those who have, thank God, been most able to aid themselves, without at the same time assisting those who hitherto, under existing conditions, have not been able to make any effective provision.

To what trades ought we, as a beginning, to apply this system of compulsory contributory unemployment insurance?  There is a group of trades specially marked out for the operation of such a policy.  They are trades in which unemployment is not only high, but chronic, for even in the best of times it persists; in which it is not only high and chronic, but marked by seasonal and cyclical fluctuations, and in which, wherever and howsoever it occurs, it takes the form not of short time or of any of those devices for spreading wages and equalising or averaging risks, but of a total, absolute, periodical discharge of a certain proportion of the workers.  The group of trades which we contemplate to be the subject of our scheme are these:  house-building, and works of construction, engineering, machine-and tool-making, ship-building and boat-building, making of vehicles, and mill-sawing.