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which require a reliable monetary system. In the presence of these patent sources of depression, it may be said, why summon a large essentially speculative explanation which, even if applicable to ordinary cyclical depressions, cannot here apply?

Indeed, to allude to under-consumption and over-saving as lying at the roots of our present situation may well seem the height of ineptitude. For is it not evident, I shall be told, that over-spending, the extravagance of Governments and private persons, the refusal to recognise that the damage and waste of war could only be repaired by a long spell of low living and hard work, and general thrift, are everywhere the causes of the failure of the world to make a good recovery?

Now that the War and after-war phenomena just cited are proximate causes of depression is incontrovertible. They have given special shape to the cyclical depression otherwise due, and have exaggerated its dimensions. To the under-production and under-consumption of a normal depression they have added an under-production and under-consumption from the broken industries of devastated areas, from the depleted stocks and transport instruments in many undevastated areas and from the loss of customary markets for the goods they were capable of producing. But when it is contended that this trouble was an inevitable economic consequence of the War, the meaning of this term 'inevitable' should be plainly realised. Great wars have commonly been followed by spells of poverty and depression, and shallow criticism contents itself with alleging that the great