In the main, therefore, these speeches, with all their fresh brilliancy of colouring and treatment, hold up the good old banner of social progress, which we erect against reactionist and revolutionist alike.  The “old Liberal” will find the case for Free Trade, for peace, for representative government, stated as powerfully and convincingly as he could wish.  Their actual newness consists in the fact that not only do they open up to Liberalism what it always wants—­a wide domain of congenial thought and energy, but they offer it two propositions which it can reject only at its peril.  The first is that there can and must be a deep, sharp abridgment of the sphere of industrial life which has been marked out as hopeless, or as an inevitable part of the social system.

Here the new Liberalism parts with laissez-faire, and those who defend it.  It assumes that the State must take in hand the problems of industrial insecurity and unemployment, and must solve them.  The issue is vital.  Protection has already made its bid.  It will assure the workman what is in his mind more than cheap food—­namely, secure wages; it affects to give him all his life, or nearly all his life, a market for his labour so wide and so steady that the fear of forced idleness will almost be banished from it.  The promise is false.  Protection by itself has in no country annulled or seriously qualified unemployment.  But the need to which it appeals is absolutely real; for the modern State it is a problem of the Sphinx, neither to be shirked nor wrongly answered.  And the alternative remedy offered in these pages has already, as their author abundantly shows, succeeded even in the very partial forms in which it has been applied.  The labour market can be steadied and equalised over a great industrial field.  Part of its surplus can be provided for.  What Mr. Churchill calls “diseased industries” can be cut off from the main body, or restored to some measure of health.  The State can set up a minimum standard of health and wage, below which it will not allow its citizens to sink; it can step in and dispense employment and restorative force under strictly specified conditions, to a small body of more or less “sick” workers; it can supply security for a far greater, less dependent, and more efficient mass of labourers, in recurring crises of accident, sickness, invalidity, and unemployment, and can do so with every hope of enlisting in its service voluntary forces and individual virtues of great value.

This is not a problem of “relief,” it is a method of humanity, and its aim is not merely to increase the mechanical force of the State, but to raise the average of character, of morale, in its citizens.  Nor do these speeches represent only a batch of platform promises.  The great scheme of social betterment preached in these pages is already embodied in half a dozen Acts of Parliament, with corresponding organisations in the Board of Trade and elsewhere; and if the Budget passes, the crown can be put upon them next year or the year after by measures of insurance against invalidity and unemployment.