the latter may import foreign coal.” If machinery or other engineer- 
ing appliances are so dear that a coal mine is hard hit, the mine 
may try to reduce costs by importing foreign machinery. What 
is the result ? Men and women are thrown out of work because 
the work is being done by foreigners. 
But the men and women thus unemployed cannot be left to 
starve. They must at least be fed and clothed. For their food 
and clothing the rate-payer or the tax-payer has to pay in the 
first direct instance. Whatever else happens, that rate-payer or 
that tax-payer has so much less savings to invest and there is so 
much less money available for industry. This, bluntly stated, is 
the lesson set out in the report on ““ The Effect of Taxes upon 
Prices,” issued in March, 1930, by a Sub-Committee of the 
Management Committee of the General Federation of Trade 
Unions. That report declared :— 
“Tt is important that the workers of Britain should 
realise where the burden of all taxation ultimately falls, and 
“ to what extent it prevents the accumulation of that capital 
“ which is necessary to maintain and expand that industry 
“by which they live.” 
But, further, this country as a whole has, for the most part, 
to import the food which the unemployed are to eat, and the raw 
material of the clothes they are to wear. Therefore, the country 
has to pay other countries for these things. 
There is no gold in the country that can be extracted and 
exported, so we must export other things—manufactures, raw 
materials or “invisible exports”. An example of the latter has 
been eiven in the case of shipping. 
But if the materials that the Shipping Industry uses are too 
dear, it will in turn suffer. The ships of other countries will get 
the trade, and British shipping will no longer earn from other 
countries the money which largely helps to pay for our imports. 
In short, unemployment caused by industries being forced by 
high prices to buy abroad what they would otherwise buy at home, 
means, directly, that there is less money available to keep industries 
going, and, indirectly, less money available to feed the population 
and even to buy abroad the bare necessaries for keeping the 
unemployed fed and clothed.