One final word to prevent misconception. I have said that our present
system of relief is unsatisfactory, and I have indicated certain
respects in which I think it could be improved. But I am far from
complaining that relief is being granted throughout the country as a
whole upon too generous a scale. Anomalies there are which, if they
continued indefinitely, would prove intolerable. But we have been
passing through an unparalleled emergency. Unemployment in the last two
years has been far more widespread and intense than it has ever been
before in modern times, and never was it less true that the men out of
work have mainly themselves to blame. But it has meant far less
distress, far less destruction of human vitality, and I will add far
less demoralisation of human character than many of the bad years we had
before the war. That is due to the system of doles, the national and
local doles; and in the circumstances I prefer that system with all its
anomalies to the alternative of a substantially lower scale of relief.
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