§ The Government are also pledged to deal on a comprehensive scale with the problem of unemployment. The pledges given by the Prime Minister on behalf of the Government are specific and repeated. I do not wish to encourage any false hopes. Nothing that a Government can do, at any rate with the present organisation of society, can prevent the fluctuations and the changes in trade and industry which produce unemployment. A trade decays, and the men who are engaged in it are thrown 488 out of work. We have had an illustration within the last few days, to which Lord Rosebery has so opportunely called our attention, in the privation suffered by the horse cabdriver owing to the substitution of mechanical for horse traction. That is only one case out of many constantly happening in every country. Then there are the fluctuations of business which at one moment fill a workshop with orders which even overtime cannot cope with, and at another moment leave the same workshops with rusting machinery for lack of something to do. Trade has its currents, and its tides, and its storms and its calms like the sea, which seem to be almost just as little under human control, or, at any rate, just as little under the control of the victims of these changes, and to say that you can establish by any system an absolute equilibrium in the trade and concerns of the country is to make a promise which no man of intelligence would ever undertake to honour. You might as well promise to flatten out the Atlantic Ocean. But still, it is poor seamanship that puts out to sea without recognising its restlessness, and the changefulness of the weather, and the perils and suffering thus produced. These perils of trade depression come at regular intervals, and every time they arrive they bring with them an enormous amount of distress. It is the business of statesmanship to recognise that fact, and to address itself with courage and resolution to provide against it.