[ 344 1 DONALD A. RITCHIE as stenographers, bookkeepers, and dressmakers.40 They had assisted thirteen thousand three hundred people, from a total Of four hundred thousand who were unemployed. If the statistical results seemed meager, Chairman Gary reminded his critics that much of the committee's work involved constructing a permanent program for ending unemployment. When the committee did present a program in its final report in January 1916, it masterfully balanced progressive social reforms with conservative nullifications. Government responsibility should be the basis for solving unemployment, but only in cooperation with industry and without increases in taxation. Drawing heavily from European experiences, the committee's report described several means of action. The first, a permanent association of private and public welfare agencies and concerned citizens, really meant the institutionalization of the committee. Another proposed a nationwide network of public employment bureaus to shift the unemployed to areas where they could find work during seasonal fluctuations in the labor market. The report made no reference to the social consequences of continually uprooting these workers. The committee did, on the other hand, take into account Comptroller Prender- gast's recalcitrance by suggesting that the city put aside a flexible public improvements fund to spend on employment-giving public works in times of depression. The flexible fund would also discourage any future hard-pressed administration from imposing higher taxes to pay for emergency relief. The report then called for more cooperation between business and government in planning for steadiness of employment, which it considered a proper "function of management!'41 The last suggestion dealt with unemployment insurance, a concept many reformers believed to be the best solution for unemployment. By 1915 unemployment insurance had become a well-known but controversial theory. Several European nations had already adopted the "Ghent plan" of subsidizing union benefit funds, and by 1911 the Liberal ministry in Great Britain had secured passage of a program of labor exchanges and unemployment insurance. The National Insurance Act created a fund that drew equally from the workers, employers, and 40 Report of the Treasurer, April 13,1915, Perkins Papers; Times, April 25,1915. 41 Report of the Mayor's Committee on Unemployment, 46-52, 59,62.