t, less and less is made to stock, more
and more to order, and orders are given at shorter and shorter notice.
So looms and weavers kept idle during a large part of the year are
driven into fevered activity of manufacture for short irregular
periods. The same applies to many other season and fashion trades. The
irregularity of demand prevents these trades from reaping the full
advantages of the economies of machinery, though the partial
application of machinery and power facilitates the execution of orders
at short notice. Hence the increased proportion of the community's
income spent on luxuries requires an increased proportion of the
labour of the community to be expended in their production. This
signifies a drifting of labour from the more steady forms of
employment to those which are less steady and whose unsteadiness is
constantly increasing. A larger proportion of town workers is
constantly passing into trades connected with preparing and preserving
animal and vegetable substances, to such industries as the hat and
bonnet, confectionery, bookbinding, trades affected by weather,
holiday and season trades, or those in which changes in taste and
fashion are largely operative.

Thus it appears there are three modes in which modern capitalist
methods of production cause temporary unemployment. (1) Continual
increments of labour-saving machinery displace a number of workers,
compelling them to remain wholly or partially unemployed, until they
have "adjusted" themselves to the new economic conditions. (2)
Miscalculation and temporary over-production, to which machine
industries with a wide unstable market are particularly prone, bring
about periodic deep depressions of "trade," temporarily throwing out
of work large bodies of skilled and unskilled labour. (3) Economies of
machine-production in the staple industries drive an increasing
proportion of labour with trades which are engaged in supplying
commodities, the demand for which is more irregular, and in which
therefore the fluctuations in demand for labour must be greater.

Most economists, still deeply imbued with a belief in the admirable
order and economy of "the play of economic forces," appear to regard
all unemployment not assignable to individual vice or incapacity as
the natural and necessary effect of the process of adjustment by which
industrial progress is achieved, ignoring altogether the two latter
classes of consideration. There is, however, reason to