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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
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