Anyway, unemployment in the twentieth century has so far been less
prevalent than it was in the nineteenth, and nobody now suggests, as did
Mrs. Besant in 1889, that the increasing army of the unemployed,
provided with work by the State, would ultimately oust the employees of
private capitalism. Unemployment in fact is at least as old as the days
of Queen Elizabeth, when the great Poor Law of 1601 was passed to cope
with it. Whilst labour was scattered and the artisan still frequently
his own master, unemployment was indefinite and relatively
imperceptible. When masses of men and women came to be employed in
factories, the closing of the factory made unemployment obvious to those
on the spot. But two generations ago Lancashire and Yorkshire were far
away from London, and the nation as a whole knew little and cared less
about hard times amongst cotton operatives or iron-workers in the remote
north.
It may be said with fair accuracy that Unemployment was scarcely
recognised as a social problem before the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, though in fact it had existed for centuries, and had been
prevalent for fifty years. Mill in his "Political Economy," which treats
so sympathetically of the state of labour under capitalism, has no
reference to it in the elaborate table of contents. Indeed the word
unemployment is so recent as to have actually been unknown before the
early nineties[40].
Pages:
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267