I first became aware of the unemployment problem in 1928. At
that time 1 had just come back from Burma, where unemployment was only a word,
and 1 had gone to Burma when I was still a boy and the post-war boom was not
quite over. When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that
horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being
unemployed. 1 was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the
loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million
are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But
at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because
this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were
still talking about "lazy idle loafers on the dole" and saying that "these men
could all find work if they wanted to," and naturally these opinions spread
among the working class themselves. I remember the shock of astonishment it gave
me, when I first mingled with tramps and beggars, to find that a fair
proportion, perhaps a quarter, of these beings whom 1 had taught to regard as
cynical parasites, were decent young miners and cotton workers gazing at their
destiny with the same sort of dumb amazement as all animal in a trap. They
simply could not understand what was happening to them. They had been brought up
to work, and behold! It seemed as if they were never going to have the chance of
working again. In their circumstance it was inevitable, at first, that they
should be haunted by a feeling of personal degradation. That was the attitude
towards unemployment in those days: it was a disaster which happened to you as
an individual and for you were to blame. The unemployed men were ashamed of being unemployed because they had the opinion that ______.