Free Trade will have yielded the necessary funds to
the revenue, we mean to move forward into this great new field. But
let me say one thing which is of the utmost importance. We must
remember that the field of insurance is already largely covered by a
great mass of benevolent and friendly societies, just as the field of
unemployment insurance is already occupied to some extent by trade
unions, and the Government would not approve of any development or
extension of the policy of insurance which did not do full justice to
existing institutions, or which did not safeguard those institutions,
to whom we owe so inestimable and incommensurable a debt, or caused
any sudden disturbance or any curtailment of their general methods of
business. On the contrary, we believe that when our proposals are put
in their full detail before the country, they will be found to benefit
and encourage and not to injure those agencies which have so long been
voluntarily and prosperously at work.

The decisive question is this--will the British working classes
embrace the opportunities which will shortly be offered to them? They
are a new departure; they involve an element of compulsion and of
regulation which is unusual in our happy-go-lucky English life. The
opportunity may never return. For my own part, I confess to you, my
friends in Manchester, that I would work for such a policy and would
try to carry it through even if it were a little unpopular at first,
and would be willing to pay the forfeit of a period of exclusion from
power, in order to have carried such a policy through; because I know
that there is no other way within the reach of this generation of men
and women by which the stream of preventable misery can be cut off.

If I had my way I would write the word "Insure" over the door of every
cottage, and upon the blotting-book of every public man, because I am
convinced that by sacrifices which are inconceivably small, which are
all within the power of the very poorest man in regular work, families
can be secured against catastrophes which otherwise would smash them
up for ever. I think it is our duty to use the strength and the
resources of the State to arrest the ghastly waste not merely of human
happiness but of national health and strength which follows when a
working man's home which has taken him years to get together is broken
up and scattered through a long spell of unemployment, or when,
through the death, the sickness, o