It must, however, be remembered that the British people are more than any other people in the world a manufacturing people.  It is certain that our population could never have attained its present vast numbers, nor our country have achieved its position in the world, without an altogether unusual reliance upon manufacture as opposed to simple agriculture.  The ordinary changes and transitions inseparable from the active life and growth of modern industry, therefore, operate here with greater relative intensity than in other countries.  An industrial disturbance is more serious in Great Britain than in other countries, for it affects a far larger proportion of the people, and in their distresses the urban democracy are not sustained by the same solid backing of country-folk and peasant cultivators that we see in other lands.  It has, therefore, become a paramount necessity for us to make scientific provision against the fluctuations and set-backs which are inevitable in world commerce and in national industry.

We have lately seen how the backwash of an American monetary disturbance or a crisis in the Near East or in the Far East, or some other cause influencing world trade, and as independent of our control as are the phases of the moon, may easily have the effect of letting loose upon thousands of humble families and households all the horrors of a state of siege or a warlike blockade.  Then there are strikes and trade disputes of all kinds which affect vast numbers of people altogether unconcerned in the quarrel.  Now, I am not going to-night to proclaim the principle of the “right to work.”  There is not much use in proclaiming a right apart from its enforcement; and when it is enforced there is no need to proclaim it.  But what I am here to assert, and to assert most emphatically, is the responsibility of Government towards honest and law-abiding citizens; and I am surprised that that responsibility should ever be challenged or denied.

When there is a famine in India, when owing to some unusual course of nature the sky refuses its rains and the earth its fruits, relief works are provided in the provinces affected, trains of provisions are poured in from all parts of that great Empire, aid and assistance are given to the population involved, not merely to enable them to survive the period of famine, but to resume their occupations at its close.  An industrial disturbance in the manufacturing districts and the great cities of this country presents itself to the ordinary artisan in exactly the same way as the failure of crops in a large province in India presents itself to the Hindu cultivator.  The means by which he lives are suddenly removed, and ruin in a form more or less swift and terrible stares him instantly in the face.  That is a contingency which seems to fall within the most primary and fundamental obligations of any organisation of Government.  I do not know whether in all countries or in all ages that responsibility could be maintained, but I do say that here and now in this wealthy country and in this scientific age it does in my opinion exist, is not discharged, ought to be discharged, and will have to be discharged.