expense of rates.

Serious as is the problem of national finance, the fiscal resources of
the Central Government are still far more elastic and less objectionable
than those which the local authorities possess. I suggest, accordingly,
as a policy for the immediate future, the raising of the scale of
national relief to a more adequate level, coupled with the abolition of
what I have termed wholesale outdoor relief in the localities. What it
is right to pay on a uniform scale should be paid entirely by the
Central Government, and local outdoor relief should be restricted to its
proper function of the alleviation of cases of exceptional distress
after special inquiries into the individual circumstances of each case.

One final word to prevent misconception. I have said that our present
system of relief is unsatisfactory, and I have indicated certain
respects in which I think it could be improved. But I am far from
complaining that relief is being granted throughout the country as a
whole upon too generous a scale. Anomalies there are which, if they
continued indefinitely, would prove intolerable. But we have been
passing through an unparalleled emergency. Unemployment in the last two
years has been far more widespread and intense than it has ever been
before in modern times, and never was it less true that the men out of
work have mainly themselves to blame. But it has meant far less
distress, far less destruction of human vitality, and I will add far
less demoralisation of human character than many of the bad years we had
before the war. That is due to the system of doles, the national and
local doles; and in the circumstances I prefer that system with all its
anomalies to the alternative of a substantially lower scale of relief.
We are still in the midst of that emergency; and if we are faced, as I
think for this decade we must expect to be faced, with that dilemma
which I indicated earlier, I should prefer, and I hope that every
Liberal will prefer, to err by putting the scale of relief somewhat too
high for prudence and equity rather than obviously too low for humanity
and decency.

THE PROBLEM OF THE MINES

BY ARNOLD D. MCNAIR

M.A., LL.M., C.B.E.; Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge;
Secretary of Coal Conservation Committee, 1916-1918; Secretary of
Advisory Board of Coal Controller, 1917-1919; Secretary of Coal Industry
Commission, 1919 (Sankey Commission).

Mr. McNair said:--Need I labour