Liberalism and the Social Problem | Page 3

or as an inevitable part of the social system.
Here the new Liberalism parts with laissez-faire, and those who defend
it. It assumes that the State must take in hand the problems of industrial
insecurity and unemployment, and must solve them. The issue is vital.
Protection has already made its bid. It will assure the workman what is
in his mind more than cheap food--namely, secure wages; it affects to
give him all his life, or nearly all his life, a market for his labour so
wide and so steady that the fear of forced idleness will almost be
banished from it. The promise is false. Protection by itself has in no
country annulled or seriously qualified unemployment. But the need to
which it appeals is absolutely real; for the modern State it is a problem
of the Sphinx, neither to be shirked nor wrongly answered. And the
alternative remedy offered in these pages has already, as their author
abundantly shows, succeeded even in the very partial forms in which it
has been applied. The labour market can be steadied and equalised over

a great industrial field. Part of its surplus can be provided for. What Mr.
Churchill calls "diseased industries" can be cut off from the main body,
or restored to some measure of health. The State can set up a minimum
standard of health and wage, below which it will not allow its citizens
to sink; it can step in and dispense employment and restorative force
under strictly specified conditions, to a small body of more or less
"sick" workers; it can supply security for a far greater, less dependent,
and more efficient mass of labourers, in recurring crises of accident,
sickness, invalidity, and unemployment, and can do so with every hope
of enlisting in its service voluntary forces and individual virtues of
great value.
This is not a problem of "relief," it is a method of humanity, and its aim
is not merely to increase the mechanical force of the State, but to raise
the average of character, of morale, in its citizens. Nor do these
speeches represent only a batch of platform promises. The great scheme
of social betterment preached in these pages is already embodied in half
a dozen Acts of Parliament, with corresponding organisations in the
Board of Trade and elsewhere; and if the Budget passes, the crown can
be put upon them next year or the year after by measures of insurance
against invalidity and unemployment.
Mr. Churchill's second proposition is the correlative of the first. How
shall this imposing fabric of industrial security be reared and made safe?
The answer is, by modifying, without vitally changing, the basis of
taxation. The workman cannot be asked to pay for everything, as under
Protection he must pay. In any case, he must pay for something. But if
he is asked for too much, the sources of physical efficiency are drained,
and the main purpose of the new Liberalism--the ideal of an educated,
hopeful, and vigorous people--is destroyed. Now Liberalism, in ceasing
to rely on indirect taxation as its main source of revenue, has opened up
for contribution not merely the superfluities of society, the
"accumulations of profit," as Mr. Churchill calls them, but those special
forms of wealth which are "social" in origin, which depend on some
monopoly of material agents, on means not of helping the community
but of hindering it, not of enriching its powers and resources, but of
depleting them for private advantage. In other words, the State in future

will increasingly ask the taxpayer not only "What have you got?" but
"How did you get it?" No one contends that such an analysis can be
perfect; but, on the other hand, can a community desirous of realising
what Goethe calls "practical Christianity," ignore it? And if in this
process it enters the sphere of morals, as Ruskin long ago urged it to do,
as well as the path of economic justice, is the step a wrong one? Has it
not already been taken not only in this Budget, but in its predecessor, in
which the Prime Minister made the memorable distinction between
earned and unearned income? Those who answer these questions in the
Liberal sense will find in these speeches a body of vigorous and
persuasive reasoning on their side.
It is therefore the main purpose of these speeches to show that
Liberalism has a message of the utmost consequence to our times. They
link it afresh with the movement of life, which when it overtakes
parties condemns and destroys them. They give it an immediate
mission and an outlook on the wider moral domain, which belongs to
no single generation. This double character is vital to a Party which
must not desert the larger ways in which the spirit of man