of congenial thought and energy, but they offer it two propositions
which it can reject only at its peril. The first is that there can and
must be a deep, sharp abridgment of the sphere of industrial life
which has been marked out as hopeless, 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