passing, and believed to be essential to economic progress.[1] The depression they see to-day is deeper, longer, wider, and blocks production in nearly all industries and all countries. An earlier disposition to regard this economic trouble as a by-product of the Great War no longer suffices as an explanation. For the ravages war made in the human and material resources of many countries, the collapse of monetary systems, the diversion of trade routes, the erection of high tariffs, and other forms of economic nationalism, should have shown some disposition to yield to 'time the healer.' Moreover, all these injuries must express themselves in a reduced productivity of the economic system, whereas the actual trouble that confronts us is the existence in almost all industries and all countries of a producing power that is excessive, in the sense that a large part of it—land, capital, and labour—stands idle because the goods it could produce cannot find a market at prices covering the bare costs of production.
Now this is a new situation in the history of capitalism, so dangerous that it has shattered the general belief in the existence of a rational economic system. The 'invisible hand,' which compelled men in serving themselves best to serve the public best, is quite evidently inoperative. For the first time there has arisen, outside the range of visionaries and utopians, among the ranks of plain practical men a
- ↑ "Our modern system of industry will not work without some unemployed margin, some reserve of labour (Charles Booth, Life and Labour, Vol. I, p. 152).
