Bryce is sixty-seven, and married, but child. less.

Mr. Herbert J. Gladstone, who was whip, or party manager, for the opposition, is the son of Mr. Gladstone, and one of the few English members of the cabinet. He sits for Leeds, is fifty-one years old, and has recently married. He wanted to be first lord of the admiralty, but he was generally marked out to be home secretary. He is a hard-working, straightforward Liberal, with little of his father in him but his name.

Sir Robert T. Reid, the lord chancellor, is a Scot of the Scots, a pro-Boer of the pro-Boers, and a Liberal of the Liberals. Probably no more stalwart Radical ever sat in the Woolsack.

Lord Tweedmouth, leader of the House of Lords, first lord of the admiralty, is a Scotchman, Marjoribanks by name. He served his apprenticeship as Liberal whip in the House of Commons. He is well connected socially, a man competent rather than capable, married to Lord Randolph Churchill's sister, and fifty-six years old.

Mr. David Lloyd-George, the president of the Board of Trade, is a very witty, wiry Welshman who has fought his way up by sheer pluck and indomitable energy. He is the leader of the Welsh people and the spokesman of the Noncomformist revolt. No one put up so gallant a fight as he did for the Boers in the late war. He is forty-two years old, married, with children.

Mr. John Burns, the. first Labor member to enter an English cabinet, is a Scotchman who sits for a London constituency. He is so well known on both sides of the sea that it is unnecessary to say more than that he is a sound pro

SYDNEY C. BUXTON. (Postmaster-General.)

JOHN BURNS. (President of the Local Government Board.)

Boer, a stanch free-trader, an extremely good speaker, and a downright honest man. He is fortyseven, and has a wife and one child. As president of the Local Government Board he will have to deal with the unemployed and poor-law reform.

It is not necessary to say anything about the other members of the cabinet, but we pass at once to the more important outsiders holding office but not within the charmed circle.

The most important of these is Mr. Winston Churchill, who is thirty-one years old, whom "C.-B." at one time designed to admit to the cabinet as postmaster-general. On second thought, and in full agreement with Winston, he decided to give him the most important post outside the cabinet, that of under secretary for the colonies. The latter post has placed him in the position of being representative of the colonies in the Commons, and will pit him against Mr. Chamberlain on all debates on preference. Next to him comes Lord Aberdeen, who goes back to Dublin as lord lieutenant with his wife to represent to the Irish the good-will of the Liberals to their nation.

Besides these there are the law officers of the crown, and a whole fry of under secretaries. But it is the men named above who give the administration its distinctive characteristics. It is an administration which from top to bottom is Scotch. The leaders in both houses are Scotch. The lord chancellor is Scotch. the secretaries of state for the colonies and for the war office. The chancellor of the exchequer sits for a Scotch constituency. So do the secretaries for India and the chief secretary for Ire

So are

land. John Burns is a Scotchman. The only Englishmen not connected with Scotland in the cabinet are more or less "stuffing." The one brilliant new Englishman is a Welshman.

THE POLICY OF THE NEW GOVERNMENT.

The policy of the new government is clearly indicated by the policy which its members pursued in opposition. In foreign policy it will do its utmost to carry out the principle of continuity. It will repudiate none of its predecessors' engagements. Sir Edward Grey will take up the foreign policy of Lord Lansdowne at the point where he dropped it, and will endeavor so to act that no one at the other end of the wire will know there has been any change in the personnel of the administration. In colonial policy

it will welcome every overture made by the colonies for a closer union with the mother country, but it will scrupulously refrain from any attempt to force the pace of federation. It will hold the colonial conference which Mr. Chamberlain hoped to use as a protectionist weapon, but it will point to its majority recorded at the coming election as rendering all discussion of preferences based on food taxes absolutely futile.

In South Africa it will hurry up the grant of responsible government both in the Free State and in the Transvaal. It will probably begin by sending out a commission to inquire into (1) the unpaid compensation claims, (2) Chinese labor, and (3) the establishment of responsible government.

In Ireland it will, as Mr. Chamberlain has said, have a policy of Home Rule by installments. It

will do everything the Irish Nationalists demand that can be granted without forcing a breach with the Protestant prejudices of the House of Commons or provoke the veto of the landed interest in the House of Lords. The question of the evicted tenants and of the Catholic University stand in the forefront. No opportunity will be lost to advance in the direction of Home Rule, and everything will be done to conciliate the Nationalists, who possess a voting strength of 83 in the House. If this be transferred to the Conservative lobby, it makes a difference of 166 in the Liberal majority.

In home affairs it will be primarily engaged in amending the Education Act and the Licensing Act of its predecessors. The veto of the House of Lords will render it impossible to carry out in full the wishes of the Nonconformists and the temperance reformers. But it will do what it can in both directions. The question of the unemployed and the whole subject of the treatment of the poorer classes will be one great crux of the new administration. It may deal with the land laws, but not at first. Nor is it likely that it will attempt to disestablish either the Welsh or the Scottish Church.

The navy will be maintained at its present strength. The army expenditure will be reduced, and, if Mr. Haldane is fortunate, reduced very considerably. There will be a strong movement in favor of general physical training of the whole nation, but conscription will be treated as a thing abhorred. The volunteer forces will be developed, and a determined effort made to make the regular army efficient.

I.

HRISTMASTIDE full flood in England; but

י !

not for the vast and ragged army of the unemployed! Not for the ghastly processions, -12,000 men and boys in line,-under flags with inscriptions like the snarl of a beast at bay. Curse your charity! Give us a chance! "We don't want charity; we want justice!" "Give us work, .not alms!" It is a hideous specter, this problem of England's unemployed, -the Phantom at the Feast.-able-bodied men willing and anxious to work driven desperate with want, literally fainting in the streets from hunger, in the center of the richest capital in the richest empire of the world. It meets you everywhere, Anxious Fright, Want, Rags, Hunger, flaunting their shame in your face. unashamed because they are desperate. You no tice a ragged man running abreast your cab, one, two, three, four miles, perhaps half the length of the city. To beg? No.-on the chance of getting twopence by keeping your skirts from touching the wheel when you step from the cab. Or you hear singing outside your window. Organ-grinders? No; but able-bodied workmen in fluttering tatters, an old newspaper across the chest in place of shirt, boots that soak up the filth of the street like a sponge,able-bodied workmen under the draggled flag, "Unemployed," singing some ballad of "Merrie England on the chance of pennies from the windows. Or your cab is caught in a jam at Charing Cross. What is the excitement that draws the crowd? No excitement," your London friends assure you-"it's only a procession of the unemployed; and we're getting used to them." Or you pick up the daily paper. Ten columns to politics; one-column interview with some great man on the ways to alleviate distress; notice of a commission to investigate the poor laws, a work, by the way, which will take years; report of the Queen's Fund for the Unemployed,-which, except for two small amounts, has not, at the time of writing, been distributed; and tucked away in obscure type such items as the death of a man on the Embankment from starvation, or the suicide of a woman because she could not bear the cry of her children for food. Or you follow the reports of the police court.

66

Constable said he heard the prisoners addressing a crowd of the unemployed, giving utterance to such ex

pressions as "Stick together, boys!" "Curse their charity; we want work!" "We want work, and no aristocratic humbug!" Constable warned them to go away, but they refused. Traffic was obstructed, so he took them in custody. Questioned by the Lord Mayor, prisoner replied: "Undoubtedly we refused to go away. We have tried honestly to get work, but have been hounded down." The Lord Mayor: "I have nothing to do with that. What have you to answer to the charge?" Prisoner: "I have been treated worse than a brute. If we cannot get work, there is nothing but death." The Lord Mayor: "I won't listen to that sort of abuse of the public. They are doing their best for the honest unemployed. This is the sort of reward you give the public. I cannot do less than fine you twenty shillings each, or fourteen days' imprisonment."

Need we ask what the attitude of those prisoners will be toward justice when they come out of prison? The country is taking better care of them because they broke the law, is taking better care of its thieves and penitentiary birds and murderers, than it does of the houseless wanderers, who flit like shadows of an under-world, dumb with hopelessness.

II.

But it would be a mistake to give the impression that nothing is being done. I venture to say that such a wave of public awakening never passed over England as the sympathy now at work for the unemployed. The Queen's Fund. for the Unemployed has now reached half a million dollars, and will be still larger by the time these words are in print. I should not care to say in round numbers how many thousand destitute people the Salvation Army is nightly feeding and housing; and the Rev. W. W. Carlile's Church Army, to which the Morning Post's Embankment Home Fund goes so helpfully, is doing everywhere in England what the Salvation Army has been famed for doing. In the church, in the street, at the club, over afternoon tea and elaborate dinners, the unemployed have become the absorbing topic of conversation. They have even been elevated to the somewhat meretricious importance of being used as a football by the politicians, and an excuse for the red flag with the death's head by the fools, frumps, and idiots who make up the ranks of anarchy. "Put on a protective tax to build up our own manufactures and so give the unemployed work," advocate the Unionists. ·Yes, put on a tax and make bread dearer for the starving," retort the Liberals. Down with

capital and up with the red flag!" clamor the agitators. May I be permitted to say that all these remedies seem to me equally sincere? Meanwhile, as a poor woman out in Whitechapel answered, staring round on her starving children in an attic bare of everything but pawn tickets-bare even to the nakedness of her own shivering body and her children's, "Meanwhile, we starve!"

Nightly, two thousand men, wan, shivering, faint with hunger, huddling together for warmth, clad only in tatters of clothing, line up on the Kingsway for the midnight meal given by the Salvation and Church armies. Where are the wives and sisters and children of these men? The last procession of the unemployed numbered some twelve thousand. Deduct two thousand for the fakirs, who marched smoking pipes under flags of poverty. You need no proof that the other ten thousand are genuine unemployed. Hunger is written in their faces. Taking each marcher as representing three dependents, where are the thirty thousand women and children for whom these ten thousand are unable to earn bread? Nightly, the Salvation Army shelters open to the long lines of waiting destitutes outside the door; but the shelters can accommodate only a few,—two or three hundred beds in each shelter. the doors close there are still long lines outside, men and women, homeless, hungry, half-clad,I saw one woman on a wet, cold night in Whitechapel bare to her breast,-men and women who sleep on the wet pavements till the police give orders to "move on."

III.

When

After seeing the procession of the unemployed, whose rear was composed of several hundred hoodlums, the red flag of anarchy, and a guard of police, I think I asked every English person I met for three weeks about the problem. Explanations of the cause would require such a five years' commission as the government has appointed on the poor laws. On that I shall not touch. Outside General Booth's pamphlet, there are no suggestions for remedies. National works, stone-breaking, reclamation of waste lands, can only be regarded as palliatives, not remedies, for conditions that throw out of employment one hundred thousand people in England alone during a single year. Inquiry as to whether the evil were increasing or decreasing elicited such contradictory answers that I determined to as certain for myself, and drove to the Salvation Army headquarters in the East End.

Destitution, said the officer, who has been in charge of that district for twenty years, is on the increase,

and for this reason: work is just as scarce; but last year and the year before, work was as hard to get; but the people had their little savings to keep them from the workhouse and the street. This year, the savings are all exhausted. As you will see [handing me a package of official reports made by personal investigation], eliminating entirely the question of the unfit and those who wouldn't take work if they could get it, not counting professional paupers, and taking only people who have never before asked aid and always before earned their living, with certificates of good character from the last employer, there are thousands of families who do not possess a thing on earth but the rags on their backs and the pawn tickets of the dismantled homes-men and women who are desperate for work.

Out of those who pretend to be desperate for work what proportion do you find are fakirs?

I'll answer that by a single instance. The other night a great crowd of men stood all night in the rain and cold on the docks. These were not the usual dock hands. They were men who had nowhere else to go. Without letting them know we were coming, our battalion went across just before daylight with breakfast for five hundred and took the address and story of each man. While they were still at breakfast, we sent off another battalion with the addresses to investigate each man's story before he had time to go home. Out of five hundred, only two were undeserving.

66 four

It is not in the power of pen to transcribe the tragedies of the personal investigations made by the army. There was the old man who for seven years staved off want by odd jobs, only to be dispossessed by the Specter at last, when husband and wife applied to a local prison for shelter, where the woman died,-" of chill," the record says; of starvation and heartbreak would, perhaps, be truer. There was the skilled worker on boots, an exceptionally good character, "mother's boots in pawn for food, nothing left to pawn." Or there was the day laborer, children under fourteen, bedclothes in pawn, furniture all sold for food, wife ill of consumption." Or the case of the plumber, "six children under twelve, everything sold and pawned for food and rent, blankets and boots still in pawn, boy kept home for lack of clothing, children all ill from result of wet and cold." Or the day laborer, "seven children under fourteen, everything in pawn, no blankets, no boots, child dying of want." Another report ends pathetically with the words "everything, even husband's shirt, in pawn; this woman is bewildered."

Is it any wonder? All England is bewildered at the spectacle of good workmen ground down into the vortex by no fault of their own. The official reports contain the names of all cases and addresses which I do not give; and the list might be continued down into the tens of thousands.

I hurried from the men's shelter. It is not good to see thousands of able-bodied men, hunger in their faces, something between mad

ness and resentment in their eyes, clinging to their place in the line of homeless wanderers waiting for a twopenny dinner. I could not but wonder how long such conditions could last without turning workmen into paupers and paupers into professional criminals or anarchists, for hell could not be worse than the life these men are living now, and the prison would be at least a shelter. As General Booth recently said, when men need work and can't get work, a remedy must be found, or there will be revolution.

Piloted through the dark, foggy lanes by Salvation Army soldiers, I came to the women's shelter. About that I do not like to let myself think. The day before I had been looking at the glorification of womanhood in pictures of the Virgin by old masters. And this was womanhood too,-womanhood in a Christian land,this long line of ragged, emaciated, shivering humanity waiting for the army shelter to open and let them in. These were not paupers, mind you! They are women who work when work is to be got, and never beg, and pay twopence for food and shelter in the lodgings. There was no loud talking, no flaunting of this destitution in your face. There was just a very terrible numb silence in front of the door. Inside a large waiting-room were some two hundred women resting before the supper. There were old and young, but all branded with the same terrible stamp of kinship-Want, Weariness, Hunger. These women do sixpenny and twopenny jobs, when they can, and by boarding at the shelter for twopence manage to exist. I say "exist." It is not living; and if it were not for the different shelters they would be sleeping on the pavements. Even with all the multitudinous charities of London, hundreds of men and women are nightly shut out for lack of room. How against such odds they retain shreds and patches of decency is a mystery to me.

All the Queen's Fund, the Salvation Army, the Church Army, and the Distress Committees are doing is but as a sieve put up to check a millstream. Supposing the Queen's Fund should reach a million dollars (it is only over a hundred thousand pounds now), and you feed the unemployed to-day, they must be fed to-morrow, and the day after, and the year through. The same may be said of the other agencies for help. The only help that is help must place the unemployed on the impregnable rock of self-support.

It is absurd to say that as this, that, and the other condition improves the thing will remedy itself. It is not remedying itself. It is growing worse; only we are getting used to it. ever the cause, there is the bald fact-there are

What

more workers than there is work; and this, for some strange reason, calls up to mind the great Northwest, where millions and millions of acres lie valueless, without a possessor, not worth a cent to the government because there are not the people to work the lands. What! fill Canada up. with English paupers? I fancy I can hear the outcry of indignation from Atlantic to Pacific in my native land; and with good reason. If England insists on manufacturing paupers by her atrociously bad poor laws, Canada has no wish to be the dumping ground for London slums.

But this paper does not deal with paupers at all. It deals with men and women desperate for the privilege of work. It deals with men who would rather walk the streets all night in rain and cold, and sell the shirts off their backs, than ask for charity. Men of the soil, men of muscle, toilers, like those old Scotch farmers thrown out of employment a century ago when the landed estates were turned into sheep-runs and Lord Selkirk sent the first of settlers from Scotland to the Northwest. It must not be forgotten that the very raison d'être of the pioneer settlers in the Northwest was a great body of unemployed in Scotland a hundred years ago. To be sure, there are thousands to-day where there were hundreds then; but if a million unemployed workers were poured into the Northwest there would still be room for ninety million more without having neighbors at closer quarters than a mile.

While General Booth,-who, a former British premier declares, is the only person who can solve the question of the unemployed,-advocates emigration as the one remedy for conditions, he has not, that I have seen, especially specified Canada.

Details of transportation, of caring for the immigrant till he garnered his first crop, of discriminating workmen from paupers, would have to be worked out; but England is in the mood to work out the question. The care of the immigrant for a year would probably divert Daughters of the Empire from squabbles over flags, and church ladies from making curates' slippers for South Sea Island missions; but the results would justify the diversion. As for the discrimination between paupers and workmen, I think that if the fact were thoroughly known that the forty-below climate of the Northwest is not only cold, but will literally, physically, icily, freeze a man stiff unless he work like a fury, the question of paupers would solve itself. Scorpions would not drive the charity-fed pauper to such a land of work. The workman would go; for there is his salvation.