Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1945-02-11

FREE SOCIETY
By Sir William Beueridge
Morton; $3.75.)
We in the United States are nve
or six Britains in population, sew
eral dozen BritainS in our indus
trial potential. But our differences
are not as important as our like
neSses. We are both free societies,
based on private enterprise, and
perhaps most fundamentally we are
both parliamentary states, whose
history is a record of an expanding
and not a decreasing democracy.
Sir William Beveridge in this
sense is American" and his book,
Full Employment in a Free So
ciety," is written not only for the
British, but for us.
Beverage affirms the moral JUS
tice common to the best men in
both countries. Revealingly he
quotes passage from Charlotte
Bronte's book, Shirley: Misery
generates hate they (the ref
erence is to workers driven into
unemployment by new machines)
hated the buildings which con-
tanned the machines, they hated
the manufacturers who owned the
buildings" And Beveridge points
out: This text is my main text.
The greatest evil of unemployment
is not physical but moral, not the
want which it may bring but the
hatred and fear which it breeds"
But I do not want to give the
impression that Beveridge is a
dreamer, a mystic or impractical
He is an economist as well as
moralist, who writes for the most
boiled of hard-boiled Amer
leans. He warns us repeatedly that
there. are no easy routes to full en-
ployment, no perfectionist formulas.
He excludes "the totalitarian solu-
ton of full employment in a So
ciety completely planned and regi-
mented" At the same time he af-
firms again and again that society
should exist for the individual. "A
person who has difficulty in buying
the labor that he wants suffers
inconvenience or reduction of prof.
it's. A person who cannot sell his
labor is in effect told that he is of
no use"
Full Employment in a Free So
ciety" throws a brilliant fashlight
on the postwar's biggest problem:
Will We Americans be able to use
our manpower as completely for the
peace as we have for the war?
Outlines a Policy.
Mass unemployment is avoidable,
Beverage declares, and outlines a
policy, not a plan (the distinction
is very importantly to secure mass
employment in the pace that as
write seems to be around the Rus
sian corner. How will the policy
work? 1t is necessary to recall
that this book is a sequel to the
famous Beverage report on social
security. The two reports" have
an organic relationship. To Bever-
ldge social security is government
organized protection for the indi-
vidual against risks ito which the
individual will remain exposed even
when the condition of the society as
a whole is as good as it can be
made"
This philosophy of social security
is practically the same as the one
we have in the United States. The
Ninth Annual Report published by
the Social Security Board for the
year 1914 points out that ''in good
times as in bad people grow old
and cannot keep on working, and
the livelihood of millions of fam
lilies is cut short by the disability
or death of the breadwinner. OF
the chief causes of poverty and de-
tendency in the United States
sickness and disability, old age.
death Of the family breadwinner
and unemployment-only unem-
ployment has been greatly affected
by the wartime expansion of the
national economy"
A Higher Standard of Life,
To Beverage, the efforts to secure
full employment in the postwar are
necessary in order ''to make the
economic condition of society as a
whole healthy" Full employment is
wanted as the means to q higher
standard of life. Beveridge believes
that the physical and moral health
of society cannot be separated from
the physical and moral health Of the
individual. The two healths COM
prise one total health.
How are we to secure full employ
ment and healthy society? First,
We have to understand what unem-
ployment is. Beveridge begins with
La section called IInemnlnvment II,