Page:The Economics of Unemployment.djvu/18

industrial countries following our example, to market all we could produce, experience is against them.

There are, I think, very few business men or economists who, when pressed upon the matter, would deny that there was, at the present time, a world-market insufficient to take all that the industrial countries are able to produce, i.e. a limited market. Many, if not most, however, would be disposed to impute this predicament to the political financial consequences of a disastrous war followed by an equally disastrous peace.

Now it is evidently true that these special causes have served to dramatise and to exaggerate the limitation of the market. But it should not be forgotten that these depressions and periods of unemployment are a periodical occurrence in modern industrial life. It may even be said that when the war broke out the signs of an impending depression were already visible on the economic horizon. Postponed by the war and the post-war artificial activity, the cyclical depression gathered extraordinary vigour, and attended by a general breakdown of the monetary processes, has taken a deeper, longer and wider shape than ever before.

But if we are to understand what remedies are practicable for this special and aggravated case of a cyclical depression, we must study more slowly the curious consensus of opinion in support of the doctrine of a limited market current in normal times and intensified by the existing situation. If we turn first to working class opinion, it is because we find there in the doctrine and practice of ca' canny the most