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Show The Unemployed. In the plight of the unemployed there are several considerations besides the mere fact of idleness. There Is. for instance, a sharp distinction between the unemployed and the unemployable; some men won't work. There is always comparative lack of work in midw inter, due to bad weather and the slack season in certain industries, and there are many workmen caught in the cogs of new machinery and new methods of production whose hard-bought trades are a drug in a market no longer bidding bid-ding for handicraft where machinecraft is quicker and cheaper men who must suffer as they adjust themselves to a new order. These things are not peculiar pecu-liar to this winter, but they add to its total of unemployed. The number now out of work Is variously vari-ously estimated. It has not been counted count-ed nor can it be compared exactly with the number in other years, for America has no substitute for the police registration registra-tion of European cities. A committee in charge of the relief situation of Chicago Chi-cago gives 75,000 as a conservative guess for that city of many seasonal occupations. occupa-tions. In New York estimates made by Frank Julian Warne from a few authoritative au-thoritative figures on typical trades indicate in-dicate S0.000 idle, members of trades unions in addition to non-union workers, and a minimum of 35,000 homeless men besides. The number of homeless men is based on the total number of beds in free and cheap lodging houses, and as all of these are crowded, it Is probably near Vight. The commissioner of public pub-lic charities, has stated that there are normally 30,000 homeless men in New York at this time of year. Of other figures fig-ures one may take his choice. Numbers count for little, for. as has recently been pointed out, it is not the number who are Idle, but the ability of the Idle to meet the situation, that counts. One hundred thousand men temporarily idle but able to take care of themselves and their families make a problem slight in comparison with a possible situation In- and dependent. The demands on municipal lodging-houses, lodging-houses, charitable societies, churches, and employment bureaus, thr long bread-lines, the men walking the Bowery Bow-ery at night, the scramble for the snowshovels in . the street-cleaning gangs, the falling off in deposits at the savings banks a score of bad-times barometers give evidence of unemployment unemploy-ment greater than has been known since the winter of 1S93-94. From "The Man Out of Work Today," by Arthur P. Kellogg, in the American Review of Reviews for March. |