Not a Stitch, Not a Pair

Dire and inexorable figures were released, last week, by Great Britain's aristocratic Minister of Labor, Sir Arthur Herbert Drummond Ramsay Steel-Maitland, LL.D. Though it must have galled him to do so, Sir Arthur was obliged to announce that more Britons are now out of work than at any time since the catastrophic General Strike of 1926.

A year ago 9.9% of Great Britain's registered workpeople were unemployed; but the figure crept up to 11.8 last November, and to 12.2 as a bleak New Year came. Correspondents found out what this means in terms of misery, last week, when they went out to Wales and visited the great coal properties of Viscountess Rhondda, admittedly one of the most humane and generous coal operators in the Empire. Appalling was too mild a word for conditions seen.

So slack is work that even employed miners earn no more than the 29 shillings weekly ($7) which is paid by the State as a "dole" to the unemployed. The wage paid is 8 shillings per day ($1.92), but even men nominally "employed" are seldom given work more than three days a week.

Churches were found closed for want of money to pay a parson. Public houses were boarded up for lack of pennies to buy beer. Miners interviewed repeatedly, said that throughout the Rhondda mining area most families can buy meat not oftener than once a week, seeming to live principally on bread, margarine, tea. At the local Teachers Union an instructor allowed himself to be anonymously quoted thus:

"Most of these people have not had a new stitch of clothing or a new pair of shoes since the General Strike, two years ago. . . . Maybe they listened a bit to the Bolshevik then, but that's all over now. . . . There's no fight left in any of them. All they want is a chance to work so they can eat. . . . Nobody steals around here. There's nothing to steal. Half the people haven't a table or a chair--had to sell them to buy bread and tea."

Throughout the week starving British coal miners were cheered by but one fact, the stupendous response of the British public to a radio appeal made by Edward of Wales, on Christmas Day, for contributions to relieve the miners.* Since His Royal Highness spoke more than -L-320,000 ($1,555,000) directly elicited by his words has poured in. For every pound Sterling contributed the Treasury stands pledged by Parliament to contribute a matching pound. Even with all this stop-gap and state charity, however, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin seems impotent to devise a constructive scheme which will really stem the tide of unemployment.

*A possible contribution would be all or part of Lord (London Daily Mail) Beaverbrook's -L-25,000 thanks offering, which he offered for having escaped serious injury last week in an automobile accident.