Unemployment.

Maoriland Worker, Volume 2, Issue 16, 23 June 1911, Page 8

Unemployment.

One comes across startling statements regarding the most vital questions of the day, hidden in out-of-the-way places. W.e are told that) tho next best thing to finding a cure for an admitted evil is to discover its cause. Unemployment admittedly is one of tho greatest evils of modern industrialism. (Statesmen the world over for years have been seeking a cure, and economists and scientist havo added their united efforts to a like end, at the same time keeping a sharp look-out in the hope of discovering the causes thereof. The statesmen, tho economists and tho scientists have failed. Yet here in a book of essays hidden aw-ay in an article on one of the most unlikely of subjects, an article on "Folk Song," the truo cause of unemployment is laid bare. The writer says: "Folk-song, which w*as the mainspring of the joyousness of the lifo of

peasant England, has been killed by tAvo rival but very different forces. Tho Methodist revival mado the country dweller a hymn-droncr. The conquering genius of Handel made the English singer a Handel devotee, as ho is in the North of England to this day. Between them they killed folk-song, and Avhen they had done that they had broken tho subtlo chord of sympathy ■which held together the peasant life of England, and so to-day we can neither keep the laborer on the land nor attract him back to it." We remember noting tho foregoing on reading it some years ago in the "Athenaeum," "where tho article originally appeared. Tho "Athenaeum" is not a comic paper, but even "Punch" would find it hard to procure a better joke than tho fathering of the unemployed difficulty upon John Wesley and" George Frederick Handel.