Circular in the Unemployed Workmen Act. Like all previous attempts at manipulation, both the Circular and the Act have been shown to be failures, yet their failure is now made a reason for further efforts in the same direction.
The Minority and the Moral Factor.
The attitude of the Minority in regard to the question of character is a difficult one to understand. They complain in their manifesto of critics who say that they ignore the "moral factor" of the problem of pauperism. The moral factor, they say, is to them "the whole of the problem." But this is difficult to reconcile with their views in several parts of the Report. For example, in speaking of unemployment they say, "We have deliberately subordinated the question of character because it does not seem to us to be of significance with regard to the existence or amount of unemployment" (p. 1172). But they contradict themselves almost in the next sentence, because they admit that efficiency of labour, which is another word for character, "is one of the factors of productivity, and the greater the national product the larger the number of persons it will maintain." The amount of unemployment, they say, depends upon "briskness of trade," but it is impossible to conceive of trade being brisk in any country where the workers are inefficient or wanting in morale. Every efficient worker becomes a consumer as well as a producer, and swells the demand for commodities upon which briskness of trade depends. But further, the efficient and thrifty man has as often as not invested his money, not in beer and tobacco, but in the numerous investments available for working men, all of which are employed in reproductive enterprise and give employment to
