The Labour Party claims to have foreseen the present prostration of industry, and asserts that it recommended in advance of the disaster complete preventives and remedies which, if they had been adopted, would have neutralized the present world-wide conditions of unemployment. The successive statements of policy issued, and resolutions passed by the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress since 1917 on the subject of unemployment, disprove conclusively any such claim of prescience. The Manchester Resolution of 1917 At the Labour Party’s Annual Conference in 1917 a resolution asserted that the Government could, if it chose, prevent any considerable unemployment in this country, by maintaining from year to year a “uniform national demand” for labour. This was to be done by co-ordinating the carrying out of public works, and of orders for State Departments and local authorities. “To prepare for the possibility of there being extensive unemployment either in the course of demobilization or in the first years of peace,” the Government was called upon to arrange for immediate execution, either directly or through local authorities, of the most urgently needed public works. These were described as housing to the extent of two millions sterling, new schools, roads and light railways, reorganization of canals, afforestation, land reclamations, harbour development, etc. To reduce the risk of adult unemployment it was urged that the school age should be raised to sixteen, scholarships established, and hours of labour shortened for young people, and a 48-hour week introduced generally without reduction of wages. It will thus be seen that Labour, in 1917, in exercise of those powers of prevision now so amply arrogated to itself, thought that unemployment after the war would be so limited in this country that it could be remedied by the adoption of the simple measures mentioned above. The Memorandum on War Aims, 1917 In London, in December 1917, a _Memorandum on War Aims_ was approved at a Special Conference of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, and in February 1918, was accepted by the Third Inter-Allied Conference held in London of Foreign Allied Labour and Socialist organizations. This Memorandum proceeded in the same strain. Section 5 urged the Socialists and Labour Parties of every country to press their Governments to execute numerous public works, roads, railways, schools, houses, etc., at such rate in each locality as would, when superadded to capitalistic enterprise, maintain a uniform demand for labour and so “prevent there being any unemployment.” Then followed this fallacious proposition: “It is now known that it is in this way quite possible for any Government to prevent, if it chooses, the very occurrence of any widespread or prolonged involuntary unemployment,” and this comment, “if such is allowed to occur it is as much the result of Government neglect as is any epidemic disease.”