ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned primarily with the facts of the collapse of the State-operated system. The post-war depression followed a period in which the absence of unemployment was, in modern times, unprecedented. The national unemployment insurance system proved unable successfully to outride a cycle from the end of one depression to the turning-point of the next, during which the mean unemployment was less than that of the preceding thirty-seven years. During the period of depression, there were from the beginning 12,000,000 insured work-people with a potential right to unemployment insurance benefit. The rapidity with which this drain exhausted the Unemployment Fund may be understood by examining Ministry of Labor statistics for the year 1921. By the end of 1920, a cyclical trade depression with its consequent unemployment was overdue. Steadily the opinion is gaining ground that this post-war depression was at bottom and in essentials a normal cyclical depression.
