It would, indeed, be a miracle, if it were not for the fact that those
old economic laws, whose impersonal forces of supply and demand, whose
existence some people nowadays are inclined to dispute, or to regard as
being in extremely bad taste, really do work in a manner after all. They
are our co-ordinators, the only ones we have; and they do their work
with much friction and waste, only by correcting a maladjustment after
it has taken place, by slow and often cruel devices, of which one of the
most cruel is, precisely, unemployment and all the misery it entails.
THE CAUSES OF TRADE DEPRESSIONS
I do not propose to deal with such branches of the problem of
unemployment as casual labour or seasonal fluctuations. I confine myself
to what we all, I suppose, feel to be the really big problem, to
unemployment which is not special to particular industries or districts,
but which is common to them all, to a general depression of almost every
form of business and industrial activity. General trade depressions are
no new phenomenon, though the present depression is, of course, far
worse than any we have experienced in modern times.
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