IS THERE WORK FOR ALL IN THE COUNTRY?
THE census of 1900 gives the number of persons engaged in gainful occupations who were unemployed during any portion of that year as about 6,500,000, or nearly twenty-two per cent. of the working population. Last year it was said that an astoundingly large number of men were unable to find employment. In New York alone it was reported that 100,000 men could not get work. Mr. Leroy Scott, writing in The World's Work, casts considerable doubt upon these statements. After a first-hand investigation of men out of work in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston, Mr. Scott comes to the conclusion that the problem is not so much to find work for the unemployed, but to find men who will work. For much of his information on this subject the writer seems to have relied upon the experience of the charity organizations, the municipal lodging-houses, and investigators who make observations from within the ranks of the unemployed. The manager of a Chicago employment agency is quoted by Mr. Scott to have said, in reply to an inquiry as to whether there were not a great many men out of work, "Sure; but ninety per cent. of the people out of work don't want work." The writer proceeds to give some substantial proof to show that this is so. Mr. Benjamin C. Marsh, secretary of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, studied 118 men picked at random, who found refuge in the municipal lodging houses, the men all saying that they were looking for work. Employment was secured for thirty-one of the 118. Eleven soon threw up their jobs, and only six stuck to their work. Forty-five men, when they learned that an effort was being made to find work for them, suddenly disappeared. Mr. Marsh at one time dressed himself in old clothes and set out to test the truth of the reports that there was no work to be had. At the end of the day he had sixteen jobs on which to begin work next morning. He urged several men to take these positions, but they refused. A large number of men have difficulty in finding and holding positions, even when they look for them, because they are unemployable. "An almost universal fault with the men in this class," writes Mr. Scott, "is that they desert their jobs after pay-day, for a spree, or if they do work for a considerable time, they spend their earnings as fast as they are secured."—Christian Work.