The enforced leisure of the unemployed working man was the subject of the presidential addrees of Dr. A. D. I.indsay, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, to the Regional British Isles conference of the New Education Fellowship at St. Andrews University last week.
Dr. Lindsay said that there was never a shortage of work, although there was often a shortage of work for which there was an economic demand.
"I do not think," he prozeeded, "that we can stand by, using the tragedy of unemployment merely for lessons for our work and not realising that the unemployed man has lost his security in life.
Our System Depends On It
"This is a political but not a party question, "In the war there was always a terrific shortage of labour but always a little unemployment because, in our complicated system of industry, even though there may be a shortage of workmen in one place, in another place there are people who are not wanted.
"These men, who apparently at any moment may not be wanted, are wanted because our system depends on their being there. What we do now is to let them drop out altogether. There is no moral justification for that.
"If you are a working man and the demand for your work is intermittent, the time you are unemployed is not part of your wages. It is just the opposite. It is something that makes you unfit to go back to your work at all. That is not economics. It is simple, human folly."