The Feilding Star, Oboua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1895. THE UNEMPLOYED DIFFICULTY.

Feilding Star, Volume XVII, Issue 66, 14 September 1895, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oboua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1895. THE UNEMPLOYED DIFFICULTY.

— • The question of the unemployed difficulty is not being discussed in the Australasian colonies alone, for "we find that in England it has been and is now occapying a considerable amount of attention from thoughtful men. A writer in the Nineteenth Century for J uly says society can no longer shut its eyes to the fact that under the conditions of modern industry the drunken, the undeserving, and the wilfully idle constitute a small part only of the mass of those out of work. Fluctuations of trade and other influences over which the worker has no control may take away at any moment the market value of that skill which is his only possession, and sink him temporarily or permanently into the quicksand of the unemployed. The majority of these victims of the vicissitudes of modern society may, by a process of natural selection, be composed of those who are possessed of less than the average diligence and capacity But they are not all such. Even the best are liable to calamity. Whether the actual number of the unemployed is or is not on the increase is a question which existing statistics seem not to enable us to answer ; but the rapid depopulation of rural districts and the concentration of increasing masses of unemployed, half-em-ployed, and sweated workers in great cities is an undoubted fact, and even if the number is not increasing the evil is becoming more conspicuous and more dangerous. As a remedy, it is advised that local bodies should assist and the general Government sedulously promote all schemes for removing workers from the ranks of the unemployed, for every single person out of work who is converted into a selfsupporting citizen is a solid gain to the community at large. A good deal of what is now being done in New Zealand by the Labour Bureau is recommended, such as providing means

of shifting labor with certainty and exactness from where it is not wanted to places where it is. The co-oper-ative plan of work is also suggested under the beneficent supervision of a public authority. It is shrewdly said that a considerable proportion of those out of work aro not only unemployed, but unemployable. Every mental and physical capacity which is unused speedily degenerates, and to this law the capacity to do an honest day's work in any trade, skilled or unskilled, is no exception. Of course the great point is to get the people on the land. The writer says " there is land lying waste within thirty miles of the metropolis, capital so plentiful that the Governtrent can borrow as much as it pleases on short loan for one per cent, and permanently at less than 2£ per cent, and labor vainly crying for employment, while society *-t large maintains at a great .cost to itself, but in the most miserable plight, this army of unemployed workers in involuntary idleness." All this applies almost to the letter to New Zealand — and offers some palliation to the want of ability on the part of our Government to find a solution of the difficulty, but it is somewhat singular that in our Local Government Bill there should be such similarity to some of the suggestions made by the writer in England.