"There are few things more demoralising to a man than to have a long spell of unemployment with day after day of fruitless searching for work. It turns scores of decent men into loafers. Many a confirmed loafer to-day is simply what he is because our present social system takes no account of a man being out of work. No one cares whether he gets a job or goes to the dogs. If he goes to the dogs the nation is the loser in a double sense. It has lost a worker, and therefore a wealth-maker. Secondly, it has to spend public money in maintaining him or his family in some kind of way, whether in workhouse, infirmary, prison or asylum. "A man who is out of work for long nearly always degenerates. For example, if a decent fellow falls out in October and fails to get a job say by March, he loses his anxiety to work. The exposure, the insufficient food, his half-starved condition, have such a deteriorating effect upon him that he becomes indifferent whether he gets work or not. He thus passes from the unemployed state to the unemployable state. It ought to be a duty of the nation to see that a man does not become degenerate." In his own unemployed days, he awoke every morning with the half-suppressed prayer: "God help me to-day. Where shall I look for work to-day? Where can I earn a bob?" Actual starvation was only kept away by occasional help from his own and his wife's people and by the few shillings out-of-work pay which his Trade Union allowed him every week. Even in those days he was never so hard up as not to be ready to help others in greater privation. He was out one morning when he met a man whom he knew slightly near his own house. He could see that he looked ill and that he wanted to speak. So he went up to him and said: "Well, mate, what's amiss?" With tears in his eyes the man told his tale--his tale of starvation. He was afraid or ashamed to ask for relief, and there had been no food in his house for over twenty-four hours. Crooks told the man to go home, promising to come to him presently. He himself went back to his own home and told his wife. "Let's see what we've got," she said. All she found was a portion of a packet of cocoa and a loaf of bread. She made a large jug of cocoa and gave her out-of-work husband that and the loaf to take round to the other man's family. "It's all we have in the house," she said; "but we've had our breakfast, and they haven't." Work came at last in an unexpected way. He was returning home after another empty day when he hailed a carman and asked for a lift. "All right, mate, jump up," was the response. As they sat chatting side by side, the carman learnt that his companion was seeking work. "What's yer trade?" he inquired. "A cooper." "Why, the guv'nor wants a cooper."