But there are other considerations which you have to take into account.
If you get a situation such that the man who loses his job becomes
thereby much better-off than the man who remains at work, I do not say
that the former man will necessarily be demoralised, but I do say that
the latter man will become disgruntled. I do not want to put that
consideration too high. At the present time there are many such
anomalies; in a great many occupations, the wages that the men at work
are receiving amount to much less than the money they would obtain if
they lost their jobs and were labelled unemployed. But they have stuck
to their jobs, they are carrying on, with a patience and good humour
that are beyond all praise. Yes, but that state of affairs is so
anomalous, so contrary to our elementary sense of fairness that, as a
permanent proposition it would prove intolerable. We cannot go on for
ever with a system under which in many trades men receive much more when
they are unemployed than when they are at work. On the other hand, the
attempt to avoid such anomalies leads us, so long as we have a uniform
scale of relief, against an alternative which is equally intolerable.
Wages vary greatly from trade to trade; and, if the scale of relief is
not to exceed the wages paid in _any_ occupation it must be very low
indeed. That is the root dilemma of the problem of unemployment
relief--how if your scale of relief is not to be too high for equity and
prudence it is not to be too low for humanity and decency. We have not,
as some people imagine, done anything in recent years to escape from it,
we have merely exchanged one horn of the dilemma for the other.

In any satisfactory system the scale of relief must vary from occupation
to occupation, in accordance with the normal standard of wages ruling in
each case. But it is very difficult, in fact I think it would always be
impracticable to do that under any system of relief, administered by the