Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/602

584 pounds sterling, or $1,250,000 per week, to the whole people of the Kingdom, to be spent for other things.

The evidence is also conclusive that the ability of the population of the world to consume is greater than ever before, and is rapidly increasing. Indeed, such a conclusion is a corollary from the acknowledged fact of increased production the end and object of all production being consumption. Take, for example, the United States, with its present population of sixty million—a population that undoubtedly produces and consumes more per head than any other equal number of people on the face of the globe, and is producing and consuming very much more than it did ten or even five years ago. The business of exchanging the products or services, and of satisfying thereby the wants of such a people is, therefore, necessarily immense, and with the annual increase of population, and with consuming power increasing in an even larger ratio, the volume of such business must continue to increase. And what is true of the United States is true, in a greater or less degree, of all the other nations of the globe. There is, therefore, nothing inconsistent or mysterious in the maintenance or increase in the volume of the world's business contemporaneously with a depression of trade—in the sense of a reduction of profits—occasioned by an intense competition to dispose of commodities, which have been produced under comparatively new conditions in excess of a satisfactory remunerative demand in the world's markets.

The popular sentiment which has instinctively attributed the remarkable disturbance of trade within recent years to the more remarkable changes which have taken place concurrently in the methods of production and distribution has, therefore, not been mistaken. The almost instinctive efforts of producers everywhere to arrest what they consider "bad trade" by partially or wholly interrupting production has not been inexpedient; and the use of the word "over-production," stripped of its looseness of expression, and in the sense as defined by the British Commission (and as heretofore shown), is not inappropriate in discussing the economic phenomena under consideration. It would also seem as if much of the bewilderment that is still attendant upon this subject, and the secret of the fruitlessness of most of the elaborate inquiries that have been instituted concerning it, have been due mainly to an inability to distinguish clearly between a causation that is primary, all-sufficient, and which has acted in the nature of unity, and causes which are in the nature of sequences or derivatives. One striking illustration of this is to be found in the tendency of many of the English writers and investigators to consider the immense losses which British farming capital has experienced since 1873, as alone sufficient to account for all the disturbances to which trade and industry in the United Kingdom have been subjected during the same period. That such losses have been extensive and disastrous without precedent, is not to be questioned. Sir James Caird estimates this loss