the stops or work the pedals of an organ.  In this way, you would not eliminate unemployment, you certainly would not prevent the creation of unemployables; but you would considerably limit the scale of unemployment, you would reduce the oscillation of the industrial system, you would increase its stability, and by every step that you took in that direction you would free thousands of your fellow-countrymen from undeserved agony and ruin, and a far greater number from the haunting dread of ruin.  That is the first point—­a gap, a hiatus in our social organisation—­to which I direct your attention to-night, and upon which the intelligence of this country ought to be concentrated.

The second vicious condition is positive and not negative.  I mean the gross, and, I sometimes fear, increasing evil of casual labour.  We talk a great deal about the unemployed, but the evil of the under-employed is the tap-root of unemployment.  There is a tendency in many trades, almost in all trades, to have a fringe of casual labour on hand, available as a surplus whenever there is a boom, flung back into the pool whenever there is a slump.  Employers and foremen in many trades are drawn consciously or unconsciously to distribute their work among a larger number of men than they regularly require, because this obviously increases their bargaining power with them, and supplies a convenient reserve for periods of brisk business activity.

And what I desire to impress upon you, and through you upon this country, is that the casual unskilled labourer who is habitually under-employed, who is lucky to get three, or at the outside four, days’ work in the week, who may often be out of a job for three or four weeks at a time, who in bad times goes under altogether, and who in good times has no hope of security and no incentive to thrift, whose whole life and the lives of his wife and children are embarked in a sort of blind, desperate, fatalistic gamble with circumstances beyond his comprehension or control, that this poor man, this terrible and pathetic figure, is not as a class the result of accident or chance, is not casual because he wishes to be casual, is not casual as the consequence of some temporary disturbance soon put right.  No; the casual labourer is here because he is wanted here.  He is here in answer to a perfectly well-defined demand.  He is here as the result of economic causes which have been too long unregulated.  He is not the natural product, he is an article manufactured, called into being, to suit the requirements, in the Prime Minister’s telling phrase, of all industries at particular times and of particular industries at all times.

I suppose no Department has more means of learning about these things than the Board of Trade, which is in friendly touch at every stage all over the country both with capital and labour.  I publish that fact deliberately.  I invite you to consider it, I want it to soak in.  It appears to me that measures to check the growth and diminish the quantity of casual labour must be an essential part of any thorough or scientific attempt to deal with unemployment, and I would not proclaim this evil to you without having reason to believe that practicable means exist by which it can be greatly diminished.