Every period of
"depressed trade" feeds the pool of low-skilled labour from a hundred
different channels. The connection between the two classes of
"unemployed" is, therefore, a close and vital one. To drain off this
pool would, in fact, be of little permanent use unless those
irregularities of trade, which are constantly feeding it, are also
checked.
Still less serviceable are those schemes of rescuing "the unemployed,"
which, in the very work of rescue, engender an economic force whose
operation causes as much unemployment as it cures. A signal example of
this futile system of social drainage has been afforded by certain
experiments of the Salvation Army in their City Works and Farm Colony.
The original draft of the scheme contained in the volume, _In Darkest
England_, clearly recognized the advisability of keeping the bounty-fed
products of the Salvation Colonies from competition in the market with
the products of outside labour. The design was to withdraw from the
competitive labour market certain members of "the unemployed," to train
and educate them in efficient labour, and to apply this labour to
capital provided out of charitable funds: the produce of this labour was
to be consumed by the colonists themselves, who would thus become as far
as possible self-supporting; in no case was it to be thrown upon the
open market. As a matter of fact these sound, economic conditions of
social experiment have been utterly ignored.
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