ABSTRACT
WHATEVER may be the difficulties and confusions of partial laisser faire, it is greatly to be preferred to total laisser faire. In 1918 we were looking back with nostalgia to a pre-war world of prosperity and progress. In 1945 we were looking back to the fetid misery of continuous unemployment. Wartime experience of super-full employment had taught the people that the pre-war breakdown of the system was not inevitable and Keynes had produced a diagnosis of how it came about. A cure for unemployment after the war was the most insistent demand of democracy, and successive governments have met it pretty well. 21
We should not be complacent. The persistence of unemployment in Scotland and still more in Northern Ireland is a serious blemish. 22 There has been some attempt to provide schemes for training workers for the skills that are in demand, schemes to soften the shock when a firm reduces its labour force, schemes to control the geographical development of industry to fit with the provision of housing; schemes to help married women to combine work for wages with work in the home, but they are in a rudimentary state. There is a great deal, in detail, that still needs to be done. But, by and large, the duty which governments now accept, of maintaining a 'high and stable level of employment' has been fairly well fulfilled.
