and public employment and of large, well-organized industries, the way
is straight and open, and the outlook very hopeful. Wherever licenses,
tariffs, and any sort of registration occurs there are practicable
means of bringing in this expedient. But where the employment is
shifting and sporadic, or free from regulation, there we have a rent in
our social sieve, and the submissive, eager inferior will still come
in, the failures of our own race, the immigrant from baser lands,
desperately and disastrously underselling our sound citizens. Obviously
we must use every contrivance we can to mend these rents, by promoting
the organization of employments in any way that will not hamper
progress in economic production. And if we can persuade the Trade
Unions--and there is every sign that the old mediaeval guild conception
of water-tight trade limitations is losing its hold upon those
organizations--to facilitate the movement of workers from trade to
trade under the shifting stress of changing employment and of changing
economy of production, we shall have gone far to bring the
possibilities of the rising operative up to the standard of the minimum
home permissible for children.

These things--if we could bring them about--would leave us with a sort
of clarified Problem of the Unemployed on our hands. Our Minimum Wage
would have strained these people out, and, provided there existed what
is already growing up, an intelligent system of employment bureaus, we
should have much more reason to conclude than we have at present, that
they were mainly unemployed because of a real incapacity in character,
strength, or intelligence for efficient citizenship. Our raised
standards of housing, our persecution of overcrowding, and our
obstruction of employment below the minimum wage, would have swept out
the rookeries and hiding-places of these people of the Abyss. They
would exist, but they would not multiply--and that is our supreme end.