Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/690

668 producing coal, clue to natural causes, will, year by year, have a tendency to increase, until, before the whole of our coal resources can be worked, it will probably nearly double the cost at which coal can, with wages at a minimum rate, now be produced, or, in figures, this increased tax upon the industrial position of this nation may ultimately attain a figure of sixty million pounds per annum.

This will arise from an increasing cost in the production due to natural causes, namely, increase in the labour required to work thinner seams, or in working thicker seams lying at a great depth. In the latter case not only will the labour be increased, but also the cost of materials and maintenance of the heavy plant required for raising coal from great depths below the surface.

This increased cost, considered relatively to our recurring seasons of high rates of wages and high range of prices for materials during the present decade, will for a time be more or less neutralized by reductions in the wages rate, and in the range of prices for materials, in royalties and other charges; but as considered relatively to our periods of depression, the effect must at once result in an inability to reduce the cost of production to the previous low limits—this inability will become intensified year by year, until the cost of production, with wages and other charges at their lowest level, will equal and exceed the cost of production in our existing seasons of great expansion in the coal trade, although no profit may then accrue to the adventurers.

This point requires probably a little fuller elucidation. The general trade movements of this country are divided into cycles each of more or less duration of what may be generally described as good and bad times. Sometimes these cycles apply irregularly and to certain products only, occasionally the operation is uniform and widespread, applying to most of the products of the country at the same time.

The cycles of good times are, it is suggested, brought about by a demand for one or more of the chief products of Great Britain in excess, for the time being, of the existing powers for the production of such raw or manufactured articles, and this causes an artificial scarcity, and the immediate result follows: the article increases in value, the profits of the capitalist, the wages of the workmen, and all associated in the production or manufacture of the article, share in the benefit derived from the enhanced selling value, and, for a time, so long as the demand continues in excess of the supply, the increased income to the producers has a tendency to further check production, but Nemesis ultimately