The firms go, but their labourers do not go with them. These, after a brief struggle, swell the ranks of the Unemployed, that sorrowful army for which the Government has just voted £200,000 as a small temporary relief.
Now I do not think that I need say much more as to the manner in which the Unemployables have created the class of the Unemployed, and as to how the working man suffers. I have given a brief summary enough—in the endeavour to be as thorough as possible—but it is already somewhat lengthy.
I wish to come at once to the principal point of this lecture—the remedy for it all!
I am personally convinced that the remedy I am about to propound is the only satisfactory one, and the object of my presence here to-night is to outline it for you.
There is a time in the history of certain diseases when any malignant growth must be removed with the knife. Cancer, the tiger of all physical ills, can only be treated in this way. The hideous thing which has fastened on the human body must be cut away from it, or the body dies. The gentle measures of medicine and diet are useless. Life must be preserved by the scalpel and knife of the surgeon. “Is there no other way, doctor?” the nervous patient asks. “Don’t you think that I might get well if I kept on the Chian Turpentine treatment or the injection of Tryptic Ferment?”
The surgeon of to-day who knows his business will answer “No.” He will proceed to the stern though inevitable operation.
And that is what we have got to do in regard to this social cancer, this economic disease of the Unemployed question. We must stop the whole thing. You working men have the power to do it, and this is the way in which you must do it.
In the first place, you must realize your own power over the councils of the nation, in the ordering and determining of the laws of England. You who are working men are already beginning to do this. To take only one instance, the Trades Unions have already combined to send a number of labour members to Parliament, and a working man holds a high ministerial position with conspicuous honesty and ability. I don’t in the least agree with most of the aims of what is known as the Labour Party. My reading, education, and experience have taught me that Socialism is the dream of an impossibility, and that the witness of history, the experience of nations, and the laws of God are all hostile to it alike. There has never yet been a continuing Commonwealth in which all men were equal inasmuch as they were State officials. There never will be.
But working men have now the power to remedy the unjust conditions under which they live. The more they realize that power the more able will they be to bring about the change.
One of the first things that they must do is to relieve themselves and others of the burden of the Unemployables—this is the way in which I believe it can be done.