of
those war Control Boards, which in this case was essentially a
representative joint committee of employers and employed. The money was
raised, every penny of it, from the employers in the industry itself;
the Cotton Control Board laid down certain rules and regulations as to
the scale of benefits, and the conditions entitling a worker to receive
it; and the task of applying those rules and paying the money out was
entrusted to the trade unions.

Well, I was in a good position to watch that experiment. I do not think
I am a particularly credulous person, or one prone to indulge in easy
enthusiasms, and I certainly don't believe in painting a fairy picture
in glowing colours by way of being encouraging. But I say deliberately
that there has never been an unemployment scheme in this country or in
any other country which has worked with so little abuse, with so few
anomalies, with so little demoralisation to any one, and at the same
time which has met so adequately the needs of a formidable situation, or
given such general satisfaction all round as that Cotton Control Board
scheme.

I cannot describe as fully as I should like to do the various features
which made that scheme attractive, and made it a success. I will take
just one by way of illustration. It is technically possible in the
cotton trade to work the mills with relays of workers, so that if a mill
has 100 work-people, and can only employ 80 work-people each week, the
whole 100 can work each for four weeks out of the five, and "play off,"
as it is called, in regular sequence for the fifth week. And that was
what was done for a long time. It was called the "rota" system; and the
"rota" week of "playing off" became a very popular institution. Under
that system, benefits which would have been far from princely as the
sole source of income week after week--they never amounted to more than
30/- for a man and 18/- for a woman--assumed a much more liberal aspect.
For they came only as the occasional variants of full wages; and they
were accompanied not by the depressing circumstances of long-continued
unemployment, but by what is psychologically an entirely different and
positively exhilarating thing, a full week's holiday. That meant that
the available resources--and one of the difficulties of any scheme of
unemployment relief is that the resources available are always
limited--did much more to prevent misery and distress, and went much
further towards fulfilling