THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1909. SOCIAL REFORM IN ENGLAND.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3201, 29 May 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1909. SOCIAL REFORM IN ENGLAND.

The scheme of unemployment insurance, "compulsory and contributory," recently announced by Mr Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, is significant of an increasing tendency on tho part of constitutional communities to abandon traditiona 1 limitations on the functions of Government, especially in the direction of social reforms aiming at the bet-, terment of the wage earner. It goes even farther, since it provides for the man who from one cause and another is unnble to earn, and, therefore, is an experiment with the risk plainly attaching to it that it may not always be found possible to help the work-willing unemployed without at the same time keeping the unwilling in the lazy leisure they have come to live for. The Right to Work Bill, which the leader of the Labour party has declared will be passed "by instalments,'' whatever that mny mean, might provide the necessary safeguard against this danger of the scheme benefiting the industrious and the slothful alike if it could ensure not only that all men should have work, but also that all I men would take it. Demanding a right to a thing implies willingness to accept it when given, and unless that was recognised all this remedial legislation would simply mean that the workers were burdening themselves to keep the drones in comfortable idleness. Still, unemployment insurance is not an untried thing. The British trade unions have practised it for years, and between 1896 and 1905 distributed out of their "unemployment funds" no less than £3,700,000, or about a million and a half more than they spent in dispute pay. As Mr Harold Spender, who has been called "the schoolmaster of the Liberal Party"—and the adoption of this insurance in the Government policy at his instance is only another proof of the accuracy of the descrip-'

tion —pointed out a few months ago, the great British trade unions "are practically becoming great insurance societies." And if the unions, which would not be likely to finance wastrels, ar<s willing to go so far with unemployment insurance, there is encouragement for the Government to take it up without fear that it will he abused, if the union 3 are enlisted in the administration, as seems to be the intention. The idea is not essential or originally British, however. It has been tried in Germany, where municipal assistance is I given, and in Belgium appears tp be lan established success. In all these cases the employer contributes the same as the British proposal provides for. The difficulty suggesting itself there is that the employer, by helping to finance the unions against unemployment, mi&ht be strengthening them to hold hitai up for better conditions; but apparently there has been no trouble on that score, perhaps because it is generally provided that the funds shall not be drawn upon in aid of strikes or lock-outs. Whether it is a wholly practicable proposition can only be ascertained under test, put when nations are found insuring against sickness, invalidity, old age, and death, providing for unemployment ought not to be impossible.