If the first vicious condition which I have mentioned to you is lack of industrial organisation, if the second is the evil of casual labour, there is a third not less important.  I mean the present conditions of boy labour.  The whole underside of the labour market is deranged by the competition of boys or young persons who do men’s work for boys’ wages, and are turned off so soon as they demand men’s wages for themselves.  That is the evil so far as it affects the men; but how does it affect the boys, the youth of our country, the heirs of all our exertion, the inheritors of that long treasure of history and romance, of science and knowledge—­aye, of national glory, for which so many valiant generations have fought and toiled—­the youth of Britain, how are we treating them in the twentieth century of the Christian era?  Are they not being exploited?  Are they not being demoralised?  Are they not being thrown away?

Whereas the youth of the wealthier class is all kept under strict discipline until eighteen or nineteen, the mass of the nation runs wild after fourteen years of age.  No doubt at first employment is easy to obtain.  There is a wide and varied field; there are a hundred odd jobs for a lad; but almost every form of employment now open to young persons affords them no opening, is of no use to them whatever when they are grown up, and in a great number of cases the life which they lead is demoralising and harmful.  And what is the consequence?  The consequence may be measured by this grim fact, that out of the unemployed applying for help under the Unemployed Workmen Act, no less than twenty-eight per cent. are between twenty and thirty years of age, that is to say, men in the first flush of their strength and manhood already hopelessly adrift on the dark and tumultuous ocean of life.  Upon this subject, I say to you deliberately that no boy or girl ought to be treated merely as cheap labour, that up to eighteen years of age every boy and girl in this country should, as in the old days of apprenticeship, be learning a trade as well as earning a living.

All attempts to deal with these and similar evils involve the expenditure of money.  It is no use abusing capitalists and rich people.  They are neither worse nor better than any one else.  They function quite naturally under the conditions in which they find themselves.  When the conditions are vicious, the consequence will be evil; when the conditions are reformed, the evil will be abated.  Nor do I think the wealthy people of Great Britain would be ungenerous or unwilling to respond to the plain need of this nation for a more complete or elaborate social organisation.  They would have a natural objection to having public money wasted or spent on keeping in artificial ease an ever-growing class of wastrels and ne’er-do-weels.  No doubt there would also be a selfish element who would sullenly resist anything which touched their pocket.  But I believe that if large schemes, properly prepared and scientifically conceived for dealing with the evils I have mentioned were presented, and if it could be shown that our national life would be placed upon a far more stable and secure foundation, I believe that there would be thousands of rich people who would cheerfully make the necessary sacrifices.  At any rate, we shall see.