relief.


THE SCALE OF RELIEF

The fundamental difficulty of the problem of relieving unemployment is a
very old one. It turns upon what used to be called, ninety years ago,
"the principle of less eligibility," the principle that the position of
the man who is unemployed and receiving support from the community
should be made upon the whole less eligible, less attractive than that
of the man who is working and living upon the wages that he earns. That
is a principle which has been exposed to much criticism and denunciation
in these modern days. We are told that it is the false and antiquated
doctrine of a hard-hearted and coarse-minded age, which thought that
unemployment was usually a man's own fault, which saw a malingerer in
every recipient of relief, which was obsessed by the bad psychology of
pains and penalties and looked instinctively for a deterrent as the cure
for every complex evil.

But, however that may be, this principle of less eligibility is one
which you cannot ignore. It is not merely or mainly a matter of the
effect on the character of the workmen who receive relief. The danger
that adequate relief will demoralise the recipient has, I agree, been
grossly exaggerated in the past. Prolonged unemployment is always in
itself demoralising. But, given that a man is unemployed, it will not
demoralise him more that he should receive adequate relief rather than
inadequate relief or no relief at all. On the contrary, on balance, it
will, I believe, demoralise him less. For nothing so unfits a man for
work as that he should go half-starved, or lack the means to maintain
the elementary decencies of life.