State, either the Central Government or the local authorities. It must
be done on an industrial basis; each industry settling its own scale,
finding its own money, and managing its own scheme. That is an idea
which has received much ventilation in the last few years. But the
really telling arguments in favour of it do not seem to me to have
received sufficient stress.

Foremost among them I place the consideration I have just indicated:
that in this way, and in this way alone, it becomes possible for
work-people who receive high wages when they are at work, and where
habits of expenditure and standards of family living are built up on
that basis, to receive when unemployed, adequate relief without that
leading to anomalies which in the long run would prove intolerable. But
there are many other arguments.


A MODEL SCHEME FROM LANCASHIRE

About five years ago I had the opportunity of witnessing at very close
quarters the working of an unemployment scheme on an industrial basis.
The great Lancashire cotton industry was faced during the war with a
very serious unemployment problem, owing to the difficulty of
transporting sufficient cotton from America. It met that situation with
a scheme of unemployment relief, devised and administered by one of
those war Control Boards, which in this case was essentially a
representative joint committee of employers and employed. The money was
raised, every penny of it, from the employers in the industry itself;
the Cotton Control Board laid down certain rules and regulations as to
the scale of benefits, and the conditions entitling a worker to receive
it; and the task of applying those rules and paying the money out was