They used to occur
so regularly that long before the war people had come to speak of
cyclical fluctuations, or to use a phrase which is now common, the trade
cycle. That is a useful phrase, and a useful conception. It is well that
we should realise, when we speak of those normal pre-war conditions, to
which we hope some day to revert, that in a sense trade conditions never
were normal; that, at any particular moment you care to take, we were
either in full tide of a trade boom, with employment active and prices
rising, and order books congested; or else right on the crest of the
boom, when prices were no longer rising generally, though they had not
yet commenced to fall, when employment was still good, but when new
orders were no longer coming in; or else in the early stages of a
depression, with prices falling, and every one trying to unload stocks
and failing to do so, and works beginning to close down; or else right
in the trough of the depression where we are to-day; that we were at one
or other of the innumerable stages of the trade cycle, without any
prospect of remaining there for very long, but always, as it were, in
motion, going round and round and round.
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