CHAPTER I.LABOR REGISTRIES

OF ALL THE SOCIAL problems of the times, that created by the existence of a large and apparently never diminishing class of unemployed is perhaps the most tragic and most melancholy. How deal with these people? In the past the policy of legislative and administrative inaction, tempered by public and private charity, has held the field. More and more, however, society, and after society the statesman and the politician, who should lead public opinion, yet in fact do so little in the domain of social reform that is original and constructive, are recognizing that the attitude of passivity is neither politic nor safe. At the moment there are signs of a rather violent reaction. “Practical measures” are now the order of the day, for we are at last all agreed that something must be done. Doubtless also we shall do that something, though whether it willprove to be a wise and well-considered thing is at least an uncertain point, and the justification for incredulity is found in our inveterate national habit of refusing to think out our problems in quiet, and of experimenting in the dark, trusting with a quite superstitious confidence that our proverbial common-sense will be justified of its offspring.

Germany enjoys no immunity from unemployment, yet on behalf of the Germans it may at any rate be claimed that they have approached the problem of worklessness in a logical and orderly spirit, and have tried to deal with it step by step, stage by stage, by measures which enlarge and supplement each other, and which together cover the whole ground, so far as a complete and systematic treatment of the problem is humanly practicable.

And granting the necessary existence of a constant amount of unemployed labor, the German’s first idea is to facilitate employment as speedily as possible, by placing the men who want work in communication with the men who want workers. Thus has come into existence the German system of labor registration, the largest and most efficient known to an industrial State.

Germany had public labor bureau long before the practical utility of these institutions became generally recognized. More than sixty years ago the Saxon town of Leipzig established such an agency, and down to the present day it has continued to negotiate work for the unemployed of all classes without charge. Of private agencies, the oldest in Germany is that at Stuttgart, which was established so long ago as 1865. While, thus, labor bureau, variously named, had existed long before, a social congress held in Berlin in the year 1893