English Dole and American Charity

WITH a good deal of trepidation, I hopped off the No. 6 bus and walked toward the street in Bethnal Green where I was to see my first unemployed families in England. In settlement work one soon finds out how few ideas are hardy enough to stand up against the buffets of daily living. Perhaps, I thought to myself, after I had visited the people themselves I should never again believe in any kind of unemployment insurance.

Who were the people, humanly speaking, who drew this benefit? Had the British workingman been robbed of his self-respect and his initiative? Did he no longer want to work? That he was healthier I knew, for on that point there seemed no disputing the figures of the Ministry of Health. But — as we have so often been told in the United States — had the ‘ dole ’ brought moral and spiritual degradation in its wake?

On my desk now as I write is the thick blue-covered report of a two years’ study of the British Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance. This has been issued since my return from England, and, like those that have preceded it, is ample evidence of the thoroughness with which the British are studying the operation of their Insurance Acts. It had seemed to me, however, that I could not stop at reports or at what officials, employers, and labor leaders told me. To judge of the things they said, I felt I must come to know the people themselves.

I

The ‘Missus’ was out at the Nickersons’, but Mr. Nickerson was at home minding the four small children. He invited me in, and we settled at the kitchen table. He was friendly, even before he knew I had come from his friends at St. Margaret’s Settlement. Most engaging as to looks and manner, he spoke with a cockney accent and a racy idiom which brought added color to a story that was full of interest on its own account.

John Nickerson had started work at fourteen as a shop boy in a small furniture factory which specialized in overmantels. He brushed up shavings and learned what he could from the experienced men. When the firm failed two years later, he found another job at once—‘’ay-cartin’.’ This turned out to be driving a wagon loaded with horse fodder. He ‘ ’ay-carted ’ successfully for a year until he left to join the army at the age of seventeen. That was in 1917. Discharged in December after the Armistice, he went to live with his mother and drew his first unemployment insurance in the three-week period before he found work with a cabinetmaker. He was with this firm until it closed down, a year and a half later.

In the meantime, he said, he had ‘got silly and married.’ ' Not but what it ain’t comfortable when things is going right, but the kiddies keeps you too worried when work ain’t steady.’ After the cabinetmaker failed, Mr. Nickerson was out of work for eight weeks and drew insurance at that time. Then he ‘got in’ on one of the government road schemes, earning £2 17s. 6d. a week, but when the project was finished he was out again for three months. He had never been unemployed so long before, and, as he put it, he got so tired of himself that he ‘wanted to make a break.’

II

We in America are apt to think of the unemployed in England as a great unchanging mass. The post-war depression there has exceeded in its duration anything we have known; certain occupations, like mining, have been down for years at a stretch. But, in the country as a whole, Mr. Nickerson’s story goes to illustrate what one finds set down in the official tables: —

LENGTH OF PERIOD MALE CLAIMANTS TO BENEFIT WERE UNEMPLOYED IN THE TWELVE MONTHS PRECEDING FEBRUARY 2, 1931¹

You will see that over half of the unemployed in the period covered were out of work less than six months. Only a twentieth were out for a year or more. Besides this, more than 41 per cent of the persons covered by insurance in February 1931 had never drawn benefit at any time.

III

How the insurance plays its part in helping along from one job to the next, Mr. Nickerson and his like make plainer than any tables. Going on with his narrative of job hunting, he told of the break he made. His brother had married a French girl during the war, was living in France, and seemed to be getting along well. Mr. Nickerson wrote to inquire what the chances were and the brother answered ‘right back,’ telling him to come along — there was plenty of work in Cambrai. The Nickersons had one child at the time, but they sold their furniture, drew £5 on the Prince of Wales Canteen Fund, and were off to the old war zone where reconstruction work was going forward on the German reparations money. They arrived on a Saturday, and on Monday Mr. Nickerson had a job as bricklayer.

He would gladly have stayed on in France, for, as he said, ‘it did n’t make no difference to me if I did n’t speak the language. Me brother told me to say “Oui, oui” to everything, and of course I was soon learning the French ’ow to speak English. It was different with the Missus. She was ’omesick for ’er mother. She liked ’er sister-in-law, but they could n’t do no more than sit and look at each other and larf. I told ’er to be easy-like and point at things, but she could n’t seem to do it.’

The Nickersons stuck it out for three months, but at the end of that time he thought he ought to bring his wife home to England and make another try for a job there. As soon as he was back, he answered a want ad in the paper for a carpenter. He had never done anything which exactly fitted him for the trade, — that is an important point among English workers, •—but he felt that his early training, when he picked up shavings for the overmantel people, and his cabinetmaking might help him out.

‘I always tries anything,’ he told me, ‘ for it’s the only way you can get any work, and this job turned out lovely even if I did ’ave to bluff a bit to get it. I ’ad the luck to be able to read a bit of blueprint, and I bought a bag of tools to give me the right appearance.’ He was eleven months on this job, and then again out of work for six weeks.

Just here he paused and smiled, as though he had something really special to tell me. ‘One morning at the end of that six weeks I came into the Libor to sign on.’ (Getting unemployment insurance was referred to most often in England as being ‘on the Labor,’ as it is handled by the Ministry of Labor.) ‘There was four men with green cards going out. You know what they are — they’re the cards you gets as introduction to a gov’ner when there is a job to be ’ad.'

‘Yes,’ I said, for I had seen them, but it was only afterward that I came to know how significant these bits of pasteboard are in the whole working life of England.

‘ I goes up to the man at the desk,’ he went on. “‘Ain’t there room for one more?” I arsk. “No,” sez ’e; “four were telephoned for.” I did n’t stop to argue with ’im. I just runs after the four with the green cards. They ’ops a tram and I ’ops after them. When they ’ops off, I ’ops off. They goes up to an office. I plays fair and waits till they’ve gone in, and then when I sees them come out all smiles and throwin’ their ’ats up I knows they’ve got their jobs. Then I goes in quick-like myself, and I says, “ Got anything for me, gov’ner? ” and ’e says, “I ’ave just took four on,” and I says, “If you ’ave need of four, surely you ’ave need of five.” And ’e arsks me what I can do, and I says, “I can do anything, gov’ner; just give me a try.” ’E says, “All right, I ’ll give you a try, but not on the job with them fellows.” And then ’e gives me an ’clper. ’E says to me, “Take Old Bill there in the yard to ’elp you and do this bit of work.” And you see that made me a kind of a gov’ner over Old Bill. That was a lucky day for me, for that work lasted four years. And the work that the poor fellows with the green cards was put on only lasted four weeks.’

Nickerson earned £2 15s.² on this job and was officially a handy man and decorator. There was a five months’ interval, looking for work, before he was taken on as a painter-laborer under the Metropolitan Water Board. The new work paid £2 13s. 5d., and he kept at it for ten months. Then his oldest child died of tuberculosis, and, as he described it, he ‘went kind of queer for seven weeks,’ and they did not hold his job for him. It was a year before he found something else, — his longest time without work, — and he spoke of it with great discouragement.

Finally he found employment again decorating schools under the London County Council, a ‘top-rate’ job, for it generally brought him as much as £3 a week. He had kept inquiring at the gates from the clerk of the works, watching for the time when the schools closed and would need to be redecorated. After the schools were done over, he was shifted around to other institutions under the London County Council. Altogether he had steady work under the Council for eighteen months; then he had none for five, until he secured his next and last job in June. This was in an ice-cream factory, where he worked eighty-four hours a week, starting at nine-thirty in the morning and working till twelve at night, for which he received £2 15s. a week. Ho said he was away so much that the kiddies almost forgot him and wondered where their dad was. But it was better than no work. He had lost this job the week before my visit. One night, not having eaten all day, he had gone out to get his dinner at half-past nine, and the gov’ner had been angry.

IV

If you have followed this recital you will see that getting insurance had never put a stop to Mr. Nickerson’s search for work. The first time he was out long enough to be eligible,— that was after his discharge from the army, — he drew on it for three weeks. Then, after working a year and a half, he had seven weeks of insurance; then a short period on a government road scheme, then three months of insurance before his three months of work in France. No time elapsed before getting his next job of eleven months. Then came six weeks of insurance, which led into four years of steady work, then five months of insurance, followed by a ten months’ job. His next period of insurance, that of one year, came after a severe illness. Then an eighteen months’ period of work, then five months of insurance, drawing 31s. 3d. a week, then a job at which he worked eighty-four hours a week for less than twice what the insurance would have given him.

‘ Money you get from the Libor,’ he finished, as I started to leave, ‘is ’andy between whiles — it keeps things going for you while you’re finding another job. No, I don’t know any of those people who just live on the Libor, but I’ve ’eard tell of ’em. But I don’t see ’ow they does it, for the money don’t feed you well enough to keep you fit for the next job if you keep the kiddies going right. It just keeps you alive and going while you’re looking.’ He had n’t saved any money during the time he was at work, because, he said, ‘when you ’re out of work, you get behind with your clothes and your shoes, and money ’as to be spent to make you look tidy. Personal appearance do make such a difference for getting a job; they’ll talk longer to you when you are a real tidy dresser. Me girl is as keen as anyone can be, but you can’t manage clothes on the “Libor.” Not but what the Libor keeps a roof over your ’ead, and food in your stomach, but you can’t plan proper for children on it. We don’t run into debt, though; we would rather pawn some of the furniture than do that, and me wife goes up and down the street to save a farthin’. There is the two weeks’ rent come Monday, but we’ll get it paid up some’ow.’

As I left the Nickersons and kept on down the street looking for the house of my next neighbor, I wondered whether many families were going to reveal the personal details I wanted to learn from them as well as had Mr. Nickerson. I could not foresee that what I found the first day among the families I saw in Bethnal Green was to be driven home to me over and over again by the families I visited in many other parts of London, in Manchester, the heart of the textile district, in Liverpool, the city of dock labor, and in the coal valleys of South Wales. Their case stories and spontaneous testimony will enter into the comparative study of the effects of relief methods on family life which American settlements have been making with the collaboration of neighborhood workers in England and on the Continent. Before I was through, the British working people I visited had altogether convinced me that the minimum of security which meant so much to them had not produced in any degree the demoralization of family life that our relief methods in America are producing.

V

On my ship coming back from England, a very intelligent and charming young American told me that she could not believe in the dole. ‘You know, don’t you,’ she continued, ‘that people go to the Continent, where it costs less to live, and just come back to collect their dole. Great numbers are doing that,’ she finished firmly.

I was encouraged by that story, for I realized that such tales can be dispelled by the most rudimentary knowledge of the regulations governing the workings of British unemployment insurance. I could understand her antagonism toward a system which she believed worked like this. No matter how adequate your own income, it is natural not to want to be taxed so that the unemployed may spend their winters in Florida or on the Riviera. Mr. Nickerson did go to France, but he went there to get work, and he gave up any chance of help from the dole while he was away. A worker, to be eligible for insurance, must, when unemployed, ‘sign on’ at the Labor Exchange at least twice a week during his normal hours of work;3 dock laborers sign twice a day, since they are engaged for the half rather than the whole day. To get the benefit, they must be at all times not only able but willing to work, and if a man refuses a suitable job offered by the Exchange his benefit may be denied by the insurance officer.

In such a case, he may take his claim to a court of referees consisting of an independent chairman and representatives of employers and of insured contributors. If the referees grant him leave to appeal, or if their decision against him is not unanimous, he may appeal to an umpire who is appointed by the Crown, and whose decision is final. Thus his rights under the system are protected; but, to prevent malingering, there is this work test and siftingout process of which we have no general counterpart in our public relief operations in America. At the same time, by linking the Labor Exchanges with the Insurance Offices, the organized efforts of the British Government are thrown alongside those of the worker in finding a new job.

Another of the stories which bob up most often is that of the servant who retired from domestic service to live on the dole. The fact that neither domestics nor agricultural laborers come under the Insurance Acts makes a case of this kind an impossibility. The only way a houseworker might share in the dole would be either to go to live with relatives who are receiving the insurance for themselves, or to be in charge of a man’s household and children and thus indirectly receive dependents’ benefit. The amount of benefit is not large enough to encourage sharing of this kind. The merits of barring these two groups of employees from the system is another matter. They work for so many and such widely scattered employers that the cost of administration has been a chief factor in keeping them out of the insured class.

You are sometimes told that this exclusion tends to keep people from going into domestic service, and in some instances this may be true. My impression, however, is that the tendency is no more marked in England than in America, where we have no insurance, and it is more reasonable to attribute it to the wider opportunities for choice which have come with the growth of industry. A maid at the house of a friend in England told me that while some of her friends preferred to go into factory work, in which they would be protected by insurance, she chose housework because it was steadier; and, she added significantly, ‘Hours are fairer than they used to be.’

There are British critics of British Unemployment Insurance, and there are grievances, abuses, and anomalies in it, just as there are in the American school system (where we may have gone far ahead of the British). These are aired in reports, investigations, Parliamentary debates, and much informal conversation, but Conservative, Liberal, and Labor Party followers alike discussed them with me without any more thought of abolishing the system than we should have of doing away with our plan of public education because of its faults.

VI

The English saw unemployment for what it is, a permanent social problem, when in 1911 they passed their first Unemployment Insurance Acts. They turned to insurance as a method for apportioning some of the economic costs of unemployment among employers, employed workers, and the public. There have been many changes since, for they have treated the new method as experimental and evolutionary. It has been neither the wholesale bounty nor the hard-andfast scheme which Americans associate with the word ‘dole.’

Unemployment was with us, too, in our prosperous years, but we were less aware of its significance. Even after three years of unparalleled unemployment we have worked out little but appeals to private charity and emergency public funds. The recent Royal Commission’s Report to which I have referred is immensely interesting, but it will probably have scant reading in the United States. We have shut ourselves off from the wealth of British experience with myths and catch phrases. In crying ‘ dole,’ and investing the term with our own misconceptions, we have raised a wall over which we seem unable to look. Once we look over it we shall see more clearly where the British have succeeded and where they have failed. Only then will their twenty years of experience help us in working out something for ourselves. Both our prejudices and the propaganda which has aggravated them seem to be giving way before the misery which our own spasmodic efforts these last four years have failed to prevent.

There are two kinds of benefit under the Unemployment Insurance System of 1931, and it is important to get the distinction between them clearly in mind. First, there is what is termed Standard or Insurance Benefit, based on a definite relationship with contributions paid into the Fund. In order to be eligible, a claimant, between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five, must himself have made thirty contributions to the Insurance Fund within the previous two years. He makes his contribution weekly on the first day he works during any week. This is taken out of his wages by his employer, and a stamp is affixed to his unemployment book as a record. A worker who has thus qualified and who is laid off, can, after waiting a period of six days, begin to draw benefit. Should his unemployment continue, he can claim twenty-six weeks or six months of benefit within one benefit year.

At the end of twenty-six weeks, if the claimant is still unemployed, he comes out of the first class of benefit and becomes an applicant for what is known as Transitional Benefit. To be eligible for this, the claimant must himself have made eight contributions during the previous two years or have paid thirty contributions during his lifetime and must undergo a Means Test, a complete innovation in the English scheme. Broadly speaking, it is around these second payments that most of the controversy in Great Britain has centred. They were formerly known as Extended Benefits, and it is to them, since the conditions of eligibility were relaxed, that the word ‘dole’ has been most generally applied in England.

Transitional Benefit is paid from the same office as Insurance Benefit; the amount paid, however, is not fixed, but is determined by the Means Test. The Means Test itself is carried out by the local Public Assistance Authorities of the counties, at the request of the Ministry of Labor. The home of the applicant is visited to ascertain what his resources and income, if any, may be. All wages earned by members of the household, pensions, or other means of support are taken into account. If as much should be found coming into the household from other sources as the Insurance Benefit would normally bring, the claimant is not eligible for Transitional Benefit. If only part of that amount is coming in, enough is allowed to bring the family income up to what the total Insurance Benefit would otherwise be. In counting children’s wages, some deductions are made for such things as carfare, lunches, and personal expenditures. Once a claim for Transitional Benefit is allowed, the Public Assistance Authority reviews the applicant’s circumstances every four weeks. As soon as conditions change in the home, — for instance, where the child upon whose wages the rate of benefit is based loses his job, — the family may apply for reconsideration of the benefit paid them. In one way or another the household income is thus kept up to the insurance minimum as long as the breadwinner is without a job and stands ready to take one.

It will be seen that the basis in this second class has tended to shift from mutual insurance to public relief. It is this change in procedure and principle which conservatives regard as necessary to safeguard the National Budget, but which has been most sharply protested by British Labor on the ground that the fault lies, not in any unwillingness on the part of the wage earner to work, but in the failure of industry and government to supply him with the opportunity. They hold that right, no less than need, enters in, and that the Means Test tends to penalize thrift and to demean the applicants who must submit to it.

While the great bulk of unemployment is treated under the Unemployment Insurance Acts, — roughly two thirds under the Standard or Insurance Benefit, and one third under Transitional Benefit, — there is still one other aid of which those who are not eligible under either of these two categories may avail themselves. This again is administered by the local Public Assistance Authority in a county. In the last report of the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance the figures show that 5.1 million pounds were spent in local outdoor relief for the unemployed in 1931-1932 as against 89.2 million pounds4 spent by the Government through the Unemployment Insurance Acts in the same year. This is a ratio of 1 to 17, and sharply contrasts with our experience with emergency public relief in the United States during the depression. With us the Federal Government has only entered in through loans by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; some few states have voted funds, but the heavy end of the burden of public unemployment relief has come down on local government and local taxpayers.

Nor does the total bill for unemployment insurance and relief in England seem so impressive, now that we have begun to tally up our own heavy outlays under similar conditions. The total British bill for insurance last year was 122.8 million pounds. To the 89.2 million pounds put up by the Government were added the 33.6 million pounds coming, half each, from sources for which we have as yet no counterpart — that is, the contributions of employees and employers. Under the present ruling, the employer, the employees, and the Government contribute each a third of the weekly payments to the Insurance Fund. The rate is ten pence a week per worker, from each of the three. From 1921 on, the National Treasury has, through deficiency grants and loans, made up each year the amount of the Insurance Fund deficit. The last two years the Government has made a direct payment to cover the cost of the Transitional payments, which in 1931-1932

4 This amount includes 39.6 million pounds lent by the Government to the Fund. — AUTHOR amounted to 32.3 million pounds and is included in the above figures for the government grant.

VII

Considering these three types of benefit paid to relieve unemployment, we are brought directly to the fundamental English philosophy as to the care of dependency. The acceptance of public responsibility is inherent not only in English law but in English thinking. The whole English system of caring for dependency of any kind, whether it is caused by unemployment, sickness, or old age, lack of capacity or death, is based on the assumption that the State is responsible for furnishing the necessities of life, if for any reason an individual is unable to sustain himself. Realistically enough, food, shelter, heat, and clothes are taken as essential factors in the assumption of public responsibility. In the case of the local Public Assistance Authorities, the amount of the grants is left to committees who act on the basis of what is termed an invisible scale (one used merely as a guide) which includes consideration of all four items. In our emergency relief work here in America, only food has been generally regarded as essential, and that has been pared down below tolerable standards. I learned that the British Public Assistance allowances tend to be slightly lower than the insurance benefits, although in many special instances, such as in sickness, they may be higher. They may also supplement the Standard Insurance Benefit where there is some particular need.

The following table gives the weekly rates allowed under the Unemployment Insurance Acts of 1931. It will be seen that the gradations of benefit have to do with age, not with the earnings of the beneficiary — a point on which most American thinking breaks with the English precedent. Likewise the premiums paid by the British are at a flat rate, and not a percentage on pay roll, as in the American proposals.

Weekly Allowance

* Young men and women who receive a benefit for a dependent receive the same ordinary rates as men and women aged 21 and under 65. Persons under 16 or over 64 (they are eligible for old-age pensions at 65) are not entitled to receive benefit. An additional dependent’s benefit of 8s. is allowed for the wife of an unemployed wage earner, and 2s. for each child.

In translating some of the figures into dollars, I am using the par value before England went off the gold standard, as the domestic buying power of the pound has not gone down in the same way. The allowance for a family of five consisting of a man and wife and three minor children would thus work out as follows: —

In judging what this amounts to as a substitute for lost wages, we have to take a great many factors into consideration. The chief of these, it seems to me, are the much lower rents in England, the lower wage scale, and a lower cost of living. I was assured that 29s. 3d. would approximate at least $12 in spending power in this country, although comparisons are difficult to make under present conditions. As to the wage scale, the equivalent of $12 would be much nearer the level of pay for unskilled labor in England than here before the depression set in, and consequently it more nearly enables such workers to conserve their manner of life. It does not, of course, approach the standard of wages of skilled workers in England, but it does afford them a minimum of protection. Such families can count on it, and it gives them a chance, when out-of-work periods come, to hold on to hard-won standards of living.

VIII

Quite accidentally I stumbled on Mrs. Bruce, who was living at St. Heliers, a charming new housing estate just out of London. I had scarcely expected to meet unemployed families there, yet it was in such settings that this last aspect of unemployment insurance was brought home to me most forcibly.

The Bruces’ place was so engaging that I had stopped to take a picture, and Mrs. Bruce herself came out to greet my host and invite us in. She was a very ‘house-proud little woman,’ as one man had described his wife to me, and was distressed because her beds were airing, even though the whole place was marked by a beautiful spotlessness. Five rooms, besides a kitchen and a bathroom — we came to know the particular virtue in each as their possessor almost caressingly pointed them out. Folding doors between living room and dining room so that a small sewing society could meet there; gas fires in some rooms and a coal stove in the living room that could be arranged to make an open fire. The triumph of our tour, however, was the garden, and it had evidently been the climax to the family’s ambitions. It was sweet with flowers and vegetables, rivaling each other in a very tiny space.

The Bruces had lived in Shepherd’s Bush in London, and had looked forward ever since they were married to something like this. Two years ago they had come here. It had taken a long time, for it was a big step. The rent was £1 a week and they had only been paying 14s. 5d. in Shepherd’s Bush. They had managed beautifully for the first year, and then Mr. Bruce, who is an auto mechanic, lost his job. He was out of work for eight months. ‘How did you manage to stay here?’ I asked. ‘But for the insurance, we should have gone back,’ came the answer. Then she went on, ‘It was only 27s., but, with that little, we hung on. We had just two dinners a week, and the Blue Van Grocery Wagon trusted us some because I had always paid before. The milkman trusted me, too, and my sister lent us £2. My husband has only been back at work a month, but I have everyone paid up except my sister, and I am starting to pay her.’ Mr. Bruce was earning £3 10s. a week, and the oldest daughter, a girl of fifteen, 10s. An eight-yearold boy was at school, and the baby of the family, a girl of five, followed us around, shyly reflecting her mother’s satisfaction in their establishment.

That the Bruce family had hung on to what represented progress and hopes in life to them, at the expense of their diet, seemed plain — but perhaps there are times when hopes are more important than calories.

The Jones’s, whom I found living on one of the housing estates in Manchester, must have done the same thing. Jones was a compositor, thirtysix years old, earning £3 16s. a week. He had set type steadily with one firm for twelve years, ‘paying into the insurance all that time,’ he said, ‘but never drawing on it.’ Just one week after he had moved his family into one of the new estates, he lost his job, and for two years he could find no steady work. Their rent was 19s. 11d. a week, he said, and ‘it wanted a bit of doing’ to be able to stick it out; but they held on. Finally his old boss was able to send for him to come back to his old job, and at the same wages. For the last three months of his unemployment he had been on Transitional Benefit. ‘They did n’t ask us to sell anything,’ he said, looking around at the good parlor furniture, the bookcase, and the pictures, ‘and we were very grateful for that. We had only been able to save enough for this furniture since we were married, and it meant everything to us to be able to keep it and not have to start from the bottom again. This had been all we could afford, and have the children. Jack is seven and the twins are four.’ There was a twin in each parent’s lap, and Jack was solemnly regarding me from the fireplace. It seemed to me that, if charm and looks counted, the money had been well expended.

I had seen this same kind of capability in families living on the housing estates in Germany, and had seen there, too, how insurance had enabled such families to hold on to fought-for standards. I cannot but feel that these people are important to a nation and that their standards are valuable in the sum total of any community. Had they been obliged to turn to charity, they might never have been quite the same again, nor have had the same qualities of self-reliance to offer to their community. When these are lost, something of use to the country has gone.

The Woods were among a number of families I visited in a housing association in London. Joe Wood, the father of the family, was a stocky, dark-eyed young fellow of thirty-three, with four boys under twelve. He had worked steadily for six years after the war and drawn no benefit. Since that time, however, his work, bricklaying, had been irregular, and it was the insurance he could draw in his out-of-work periods that had kept them going. That and the 4s. a week, out-of-work pay, that he drew as a member of his union. When I visited them, their rent was paid up and the children were healthy, even though they had to ‘eat slim’ on the Labor.

Joe was somewhat of a philosopher as well as a bricklayer, and we discussed the pros and cons of unemployment insurance for a long time. I was to think of his final comment one day soon after I returned home to Philadelphia. ‘I can recollect me father, when things was bad, ’ow desperate ’e was,’ he told me. ‘As for meself, I believe it stops us from being criminal.'

Two months later Mr. Barton, one of our neighbors at University House in Philadelphia, brought this sharply to my mind again. He was backed up against his kitchen wall with an old gun in his hands, saying to the constable who had come to evict him, ‘I’ll shoot you if you put us on the street. I don’t care if you do lock me up. You might as well.’

IX

Michael Barton had been out of work two years. Less than a year before that he had been earning between $30 and $40 a week as utility man in a Philadelphia factory, working on machinery. Before that he had had a record of fourteen years with one firm. He had started to buy a house through a building and loan association, and had paid $1100 cash on it when he was put on part time. With great difficulty he kept up the payments on his house through three months of broken work; then he lost his job altogether. Three months later the mortgage was foreclosed, and the family was out on the street. This happened during one of the periods when funds for unemployment relief in Philadelphia, both public and private, had run out. So the family separated; a sister in New York took Mrs. Barton in, and an aunt of Michael’s was persuaded to take him and the children.

Nine months later the fourteenyear-old boy got work running errands for a grocer, and Mrs. Barton found two or three days’ cleaning a week. Philadelphia friends who had kept their furniture for them when they were dispossessed took the reunited family in while they saved enough to pay the first month’s rent on a house of their own. Compared to the respectable little home they had lost, this one was miserable enough, but what they minded most was that it was down an alley where the drunks of the neighborhood congregated. Even this was not to last long, for little John lost his work; Mrs. Barton became too sick to scrub; Michael could only pick up odd jobs, not enough to pay the rent ; and they were given warning to get out in ten days.

By this time the Pennsylvania Legislature had appropriated money for unemployment relief, and the Bartons applied for help. When the state money was first made available for Philadelphia, it was stipulated that none of it should be used for administration. Consequently thousands of families applied for help before proper arrangements could be made even to interview them. For weeks people stood in line outside the doors of the central relief station, waiting sometimes all day before they could get in to make their application. In an effort to make the administration more humane, tickets were distributed down the lines with a date on which the applicant should return. The date was sometimes three or four weeks ahead.

This, be it remembered, was at the beginning of the fourth year of the depression. We in America might fairly have been expected to have worked out of our first confusion and established some order in handling relief.

When an investigator finally arrived at the Bartons’, it was only to tell them that no rents were being paid in Philadelphia and that it would be some time before even a grocery order could be got to them. On the day the constable arrived, Mr. Barton had walked to Darby and back, a distance of five miles, in search of work. For two years he had done everything he knew of to earn money; he had peddled fish from door to door, and gone from factory to factory in search of a job. He was worn out and hopeless. The day that the constable arrived to evict them, he was exhausted from his long walk and almost crazy in his desperation. Mrs. Barton was crying and the little girl was clinging to her, not knowing whether to be more frightened at what her father or what the strange man might do.

At such a moment one would not turn instinctively to the constable to save the situation, but life is quaint, even in its bitterest moments. This particular young man was as kindly and discerning as it was possible to be; it was he who calmed Mr. Barton and lent the family ten dollars so that they might pay something toward the rent on a house across the street. There you may find them to-day if you have a mind to make your way down Manning Street. They may not be there to-morrow, for Mr. Barton still has no job and the family’s shelter hangs once more on the four dollars a week young John brings in from his new job as errand boy.

I had so long heard commiseration expressed by Americans toward England because of her unemployment and her ‘dole’ that it was a novel experience to find us the object of pity to English working people. Our plight had apparently seeped through to even the least informed among them. Early in my inquiry, I was greeted from the steps of a tenement in London: ‘Do come in, miss. I’d be glad to ’elp you in any way I can, for I ’ear things is dreadful in America. I see by the papers in some plices they’re linin’ ’em up for bread.’