I do not say that even now the banks might not do something which would help; still less do I wish to convey the impression that mankind must always remain passive and submissive, impotent to control these forces which so vitally affect his welfare.  But I say that for any serious attempt to master this problem, the necessary detailed knowledge has still to be acquired, and the rudiments of organisation have still to be built up; and the problem is not one at this stage for policies and programmes.  What you can do by means of policies and programmes lies, at present, in the sphere of international politics.  In that sphere, though you cannot achieve all, you might achieve much.  To reduce the problem to its pre-war dimensions would be no small result; and that represents a big enough objective, for the time being, for the concentration of our hardest thinking and united efforts.  But into that sphere I am not going to enter.  I pass to the problem of unemployment relief.

THE SCALE OF RELIEF

The fundamental difficulty of the problem of relieving unemployment is a very old one.  It turns upon what used to be called, ninety years ago, “the principle of less eligibility,” the principle that the position of the man who is unemployed and receiving support from the community should be made upon the whole less eligible, less attractive than that of the man who is working and living upon the wages that he earns.  That is a principle which has been exposed to much criticism and denunciation in these modern days.  We are told that it is the false and antiquated doctrine of a hard-hearted and coarse-minded age, which thought that unemployment was usually a man’s own fault, which saw a malingerer in every recipient of relief, which was obsessed by the bad psychology of pains and penalties and looked instinctively for a deterrent as the cure for every complex evil.

But, however that may be, this principle of less eligibility is one which you cannot ignore.  It is not merely or mainly a matter of the effect on the character of the workmen who receive relief.  The danger that adequate relief will demoralise the recipient has, I agree, been grossly exaggerated in the past.  Prolonged unemployment is always in itself demoralising.  But, given that a man is unemployed, it will not demoralise him more that he should receive adequate relief rather than inadequate relief or no relief at all.  On the contrary, on balance, it will, I believe, demoralise him less.  For nothing so unfits a man for work as that he should go half-starved, or lack the means to maintain the elementary decencies of life.