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Excerpt from The Positivist Review, 1905, Vol. 13
To raise those who desire to work to positions of permanent employment, and to save all from sinking to any lower depths of poverty and vice should be the design of any legislation or inde pendent social action. At present, casual wards near workhouses and shelters for the homeless, do a little to lessen the misery of mere outcasts, but do nothing to better their lot indeed it is pretty certain that they tend to increase the number of vagrants. Either these people should be left to private charity, or should be taken from their wretched environment and put in the way of improve ment under firm but kindly discipline, while the hopeless cases should be kept from contaminating others.
There must be two methods of dealing with the irregularly employed one, by providing for their subsistence during times of unusual depression in trade and strictly limited to such times the other, by providing for the permanent employment of some of the casual workers, and so lessening the number of competitors.
There appears to be a notion abroad that the cultivation of the soil can be adjusted to the temporary wants of casual labourers. This is what Sir John Gorst says in a preface to a little book: just published on The Unemployed, by Percy Alden In our complicated industrial system, changes suddenly take place in the demand for labour against which no foresight of the wisest Government and Parliament can provide. For such a contingency there is but one form of remedy - some occupation with an un limited demand for workers upon which everyone can in the last resort fall back. Such an occupation is the cultivation of the soil - the first and the last resource of the human race.
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