ABSTRACT
Percy Alden was a progressive Liberal committed to government action to help unemployed workers. He believed in a collectivist restructuring of industry to solve the problem of unemployment. It is true that the Departmental Committee, which last year reported to Parliament on Vagrancy, discovered four types of vagrants: The bona fide working man travelling in search of employment; “the men who are willing to undertake casual labour for a short time, but object to or are unfit for, any continued work”; “the habitual vagrant, the man who may be professedly in search of work, but who certainly has no desire to find it”; and “old and infirm persons who wander about to their own hurt.” “A man willing to work and unable to find work is, perhaps, the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under the sun”.
