ABSTRACT
By the end of 1922, as we have seen, the immediate violent sequelae of the war were finished. The Doldrums was a period of relative stability and quasi-equilibrium. But the equilibrium was not a healthy one, because it was characterised throughout by a very large amount of involuntary idleness. It has sometimes been suggested that the marked excess of unemployment on the average since the war ended over what it was in pre-war times is in great part merely a statistical appearance, due to the fact that a larger proportion of workers involuntarily idle were recorded as unemployed. I have myself always been sceptical of this explanation; and the fact that after two and a half years of the second war recorded unemployment had become practically nil has confirmed that scepticism. The Doldrums was not a period of slump, rather a period of recovery, in such wise that, on the basis of pre-war experience, the Trade Union unemployment percentage should certainly have been less than 4. Nevertheless, in 1923, starting at a maximum of 13·6 per cent in January, it still stood in December at 9·3 per cent, while in 1924 its best figure (in May) was 7 per cent and in Decembe.r it was up again to 9·2 per cent. Throughout the whole of the period, January 1923 to April 1925, the percentage recorded for insured work-people in Great Britain and Northern Ireland was only once below 10 for men (9'9 in May 1924) and never below 9·3 for men and women together.1 The absolute number of persons recorded as unemployed in the insured industries was never less than a million, only in four months,
in one of these barely, less than 1,100,000, and in nine months less than 1,200,000. In this connection an interesting point is made by the Balfour Committee. On a basis of reasonable assumptions they found that the extra unemployed in 1924 as against 1913 amounted to 800,000, while the employable population had increased by some 900,000.1 These rough estimates suggest that the number of persons actually finding employment was still substantially the same as before the war, the additional employable population and the additional unemployed about cancelling one another. The hard core of unemployment, the intractable million as we may call it, though, of course, it did not consist of the same persons throughout, but of many different people, some of whom were only out of work for a short time, was not a statistical fiction, but an inescapable fact. It is our business here to elucidate it.
