which a single honest man of normal capacity is definitely
unable to find the means of maintaining himself by useful work is to
that extent suffering from malorganization. There is somewhere a defect
in the social system, a hitch in the economic machine. Now, the
individual workman cannot put the machine straight. He is the last
person to have any say in the control of the market. It is not his fault
if there is over-production in his industry, or if a new and cheaper
process has been introduced which makes his particular skill, perhaps
the product of years of application, a drug in the market. He does not
direct or regulate industry. He is not responsible for its ups and
downs, but he has to pay for them. That is why it is not charity but
justice for which he is asking. Now, it may be infinitely difficult to
meet his demand. To do so may involve a far-reaching economic
reconstruction. The industrial questions involved may be so little
understood that we may easily make matters worse in the attempt to make
them better. All this shows the difficulty in finding means of meeting
this particular claim of justice, but it does not shake its position as
a claim of justice. A right is a right none the less though the means of
securing it be imperfectly known; and the workman who is unemployed or
underpaid through economic malorganization will remain a reproach not to
the charity but to the justice of society as long as he is to be seen in
the land.

If this view of the duty of the State and the right of the workman is
coming to prevail, it is owing partly to an enhanced sense of common
responsibility, and partly to the teaching of experience. In the earlier
days of the Free Trade era, it was permissible to hope that self-help
would be an adequate solvent, and that with cheap food and expanding
commerce the average workman would be able by the exercise of prudence
and thrift not only to maintain himself in good times, but to lay by for
sickness, unemployment, and old age. The actual course of events has in
large measure disappointed these hopes. It is true that the standard of
living in England has progressively advanced throughout the nineteenth
century. It is true, in particular, that, since the disastrous period
that preceded the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the passing of the Ten
Hours' Act, social improvement has been real and marked. Trade Unionism
and co-operation have grown, wages upon the whole have increased, the
cost o