on the railways, and 200,000 in the
shipyards, and so on? Who apportions the nation's labour power between
the innumerable different occupations, so as to secure that there are
not too many and not too few engaged in any one of them relatively to
the others? Is it the Prime Minister, or the Cabinet, or Parliament, or
the Civil Service? Is it the Trade Union Congress, or the Federation of
British Industries, or does any one suppose that it is some hidden cabal
of big business interests? No, there is no co-ordinator. There is no
human brain or organisation responsible for fitting together this vast
jig-saw puzzle; and, that being so, I say that what should really excite
our wonder is the fact that that puzzle should somehow get fitted
together, usually with so few gaps left unfilled and with so few pieces
left unplaced.

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. 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, wit