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Section D.

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

50-ECONOMIC WASTE.

BY ARNOLD H. WATKINS, M.D., M.R.C.S.

If the honour of being President of a Section entails the penalty of having to deliver an opening address, there is at least this compensation, that much greater latitude is usually allowed for the author of a presidential address than would be allowed to the reader of a paper dealing with any of the scientific subjects included in the scope of the section.

The reader of a scientific paper is expected to bring before you some new facts, some hitherto uncompiled statistics, some fresh theory to explain already recognised phenomena, to make, in fact, some addition to our scientific knowledge. A presidential address, on the other hand, does not necessitate the bringing forward of any new scientific observation, but is allowed by custom to deal in a much more loose and general way with the whole class of subjects comprised within the section, or with any particular subject at the reader's choice. Of the license so accorded I intend to avail myself to the full. I have no new facts to bring before you, I have no new interpretation of old facts to offer you, but there are, I think, certain aspects of well-known facts that are apt to escape our attention, and I am going to ask you to bear with me while I urge on you the importance of some of these.

I have taken as the title of my paper Economic Waste. There are doubtless many forms of economic waste, but the special one which I am going to talk about is the waste of human energy, of human force, the waste of productive power which is involved by our present industrial system, to say nothing of the misery that is entailed thereby. I have, as I told you, no statistics to lay before you, nor do I think they are needed. You all know, and are constantly being reminded by almost every newspaper you pick up, that a large number of people are always out of work-unemployed. The number varies according to the fluctuation of trade, but in greater or lesser number the unemployed are always there.

Now, no one would, I expect, deny that for the "out of work " himself this is an evil, but, looked at from the broader point of view, as it affects the community as a whole, the common weal, is it also an evil? To me, it seems quite clear that it is. If one-tenth, or even one-twentieth of your possible workers are unemployed, you are producing one-tenth or one-twentieth less of food or commodities than you could do if all were at work, while, seeing that those who are

contributing nothing to the wealth of the community, nevertheless have to be fed and housed and clothed (however unsatisfactorily) either in workhouses or by public or private charity, the wealth of the rest of the community which is engaged in productive work is always being diminished by the maintenance of those who are bringing nothing to the common stock. That is, there is Economic Waste.

Were it possible to deal with the people who have no work to do, and whom nobody seems to want, in the same way that our Municipality deals with unnecessary dogs, and send them to the lethal chamber, society would at least be relieved of the cost of their keep, but no one has yet, I believe, been bold enough to suggest this remedy. Moreover, there would be this drawback, that when trade improves again and more labour is required, you would have no surplus supply to fall back upon. You might shut up your lethal chamber, reduce the cost of marriage licenses, and do all you could otherwise to increase population, but the crop of able-bodied workers would take so long to produce that by the time it was available the next swing of the pendulum in the industrial world would have taken place, and you would again have to fall back on the lethal chamber.

Is there no means by which the overplus of labour, which the industrial condition of the country does not at any given time require, can be usefully employed at something else till the next expansion of commerce causes it to be again demanded?

If there be any such thing possible, three great ends would be attained.

Firstly, the community would be relieved of the cost of maintaining the unemployed.

Secondly, the workers so enlisted, in what I might call the industrial reserves, would be saved from the deterioration which seems inevitably to accompany idleness. Even machinery allowed to stand idle deteriorates; how much more human beings kept in idleness deteriorate every thinking and seeing man must admit. Whether it is, in the words of Dr. Watts, that "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," or whether we look for an explanation to the ordinary nature of things and men, without calling in the aid of His Satanic Majesty, is not very important-the really important fact is that when we allow any of our workers to be for any length of time out of work we are allowing our labour to deteriorate, so that if we do later on find employment for them, the equivalent of work that they will do will be definitely less than if they had been all along in steady work; so that again there is Economic Waste.

Thirdly. Yet again, if the thousands or millions of persons at any given time unemployed, and so producing nothing, could by any means be turned into producers of any things that the rest of the community (those in work) require, what an enormously increased effective demand there would be for the things already being produced. All these unemployed people want things; the demand for the commodities others are producing is already there; give them

the means of producing something they could exchange for those other commodities, and the demand, in the ordinary sense of the word, would become an "effective" demand in the economic sense.

One of our greatest concerns as a State is the discovery of new markets for our products, or the retaining of those markets we already have, and nearly all the wars of modern days have been trade wars. Whatever the ostensible reason for war may have been, go right down to the root of it, and you will find it has been the desire to create new markets, or, at least, to retain old ones. It seems to me clear that in our unemployed we have at our very doors a huge market still unexploited if we could only turn them from mere idle consumers into active producers. Is it not possible to do this?

Some people will tell you that it is impossible, that the condition of these people is due to over-population, the result of natural laws, against which man is powerless. If all the material in all the world were being worked up, if all the land were being cultivated to the full, it might be impossible to find anything for the unemployed to do, and we might have to seriously consider the lethal chamber. But pace Malthus and his doctrine, this state of things has not only not arrived, but its possibility is so far off that it need no more be considered than the eventual cooling of the earth, or the disappearance of its waters need be. There is still abundant land on the earth's surface which is not cultivated, and which could be cultivated; not one tithe, I imagine, of the food which the earth could yield, if it were required, is at present produced; raw material for manufactures is in excess of the demand for it, and could be almost indefinitely increased if it were worth while; so that it is clearly not the parsimony of nature which is at fault. Nature still responds generously enough to man's labours, and even if at some times and in some places she requires more labour than at others, one would think that this should make the demand for labour greater, and not less, make it all the more important to have our whole population usefully employed, and no idlers whatever, enforced or otherwise. So that, looked at from the broad standpoint, it seems to me clear that over-population is not a factor in the problem. If all the resources of nature were exploited to the best advantage, the population of the world might be increased enormously before it came in any way to press on the means of subsistence.

Nor do I think it is the need of capital. At the very time when the greatest number of men are out of work, you will often find the greatest amount of capital lying idle-show it how to find a profitable investment, and the capital is readily enough forthcoming. It is just this factor of the investment being profitable on which the whole problem seems to hang, and as long as we take no broader view of what is good for the human race than we do at present, and leave the whole question of whether a large part of the race shall be idle or at work to be determined by the direct interest of a comparatively small number, I see no hope of a solution of the problem. Good trade, the possibility of profitably investing capital, may for a time. remedy things, and work for the unemployed become for a time

plentiful, but it will only be for a time, and the inevitable swing of the pendulum will again throw hundreds of thousands out of work, and the Economic Waste begin again, with the inevitable deterioration, moral and physical, of the workers, which, as I have pointed out before, idleness brings in its train.

Is there no remedy? Is it one of the inevitable evils to which the human race is doomed, and from which there is no escape, and which increased civilization only seems at times to accentuate?

I will not pause to enquire how, if it were so, anyone could believe that this world of ours is the creation of a beneficent Deity, and governed by wise and kindly laws, because, though in our churches and on the Sabbath Day we devoutly recognise the Deity and profess the Christian faith, any appeal to the doctrines of Christianity as a working basis for practical life is as futile in the case of the nominal Christian as in that of the avowed atheist ; but, keeping strictly to the Economic aspect of the question, I say unhesitatingly that escape is possible, that it is not the laws of nature, but the conventions of man, that are responsible for the waste and the misery it entails. It is partly, no doubt, our selfishness that is to blame, but it is, I think, still more our ignorance and our narrowness of view. The old laissez faire policy has been tried and found wanting. Can we not substitute for it any better system with happier results?

Now, you will say it is easy to raise a question such as this, and to point out evils and defects, but have you anything practical to offer as a solution of them?

Not much, I fear. I plead equal ignorance with the rest of the world, but the first step towards knowledge is to recognise our ignorance; we have gained something when we even recognise that we do not know a thing, and if from that we go on with a resolute determination to find out all we can about it, some day, somewhere, somehow, the solution may be found.

To me, it seems almost self-evident that the individual is powerless to remedy this evil, that the combination of at least a whole nation, what we commonly call the State, must in some way be called in to help possibly the solution cannot finally be found till we have a combination of States; but I think some advance might be made by modifying our system of leaving all industrial affairs to the individual, and at least experimenting in the direction of State interference on behalf of the unemployed. We are told it is not the business of the State, and we are told this by such good authorities that I feel most diffident in daring to assert otherwise. Nevertheless, I do so assert, for it seems to me that the question of the unemployed is most essentially the business of the State. No one disputes that the protection of our trade and of our industries is the proper business of the State; no one disputes that the encouragement of our trade and of our industries, by such means as the provision of good harbours, of easy and safe means of communication, and so forth, is the business of the State; no one disputes that the providing of at least a minimum of food and shelter for the

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