ed from the expenditure_, for it
had raised the standard of the workman throughout Germany." (My
italics.)[63]

It is not only worry and anxiety that were removed, but definite and
irregular sums that workers or their employers had formerly set aside
for insurance against accident, sickness, and old age, were now
calculated and regulated on a business basis more profitable to both
parties to the labor contract. It is true that in Germany the employers
only pay part of the cost, the rest being borne almost entirely by
employees, while in Great Britain--as far as the old age pensions
go--the government pays all, and is likely to pay a considerable part,
perhaps a third, in the other insurance schemes. But the plan by which
the government pays all may prove even less costly to the employing
class, since landlords and inactive capitalists on the one hand and the
working people on the other, pay the larger part of the taxes--so that
state insurance in this thoroughgoing form is perhaps destined to be
even more popular than the German kind.

The most radical provision of the new bill is that which deals with
unemployment. Though applying only to the engineering and building
trades, it reaches 2,400,000 people. It proposes to give a weekly
allowance to every insured person who loses employment through no fault
of his own, though nothing is given in strikes and lockouts. And it is
intended to extend this measure to other employments. This is only the
first installment.

It is probable that Mr. Churchill's project that the State should
undertake to abolish unemployment altogether is the most radical of all
the proposed policies, excepting only that to gradually expropriate all
the future unearned increment of land.

"An industrial disturbance in the manufacturing districts and the
great cities of this country," says Mr. Churchill, "presents itself
to the ordinary artisan in exactly the same way as the failure of
crops in a large province in India presents itself to the Hindoo
cultivator. The means by which he lives are suddenly removed, and
ruin in a form more or less swift and terrible stares him instantly
in the face. That is a contingency which seems to fall within the
most primary and fundamental obligations of any organization of
government. I do not know whether in all countries or in all ages
that responsibility could be maintained, but I do say that here