54

THE  PROBLEM  OF  THE  UNEMPLOYED

and  is  preceded  by  a  fall  of  prices  in  the  goods  with  the
production  of  which  the  trade  is  concerned.
§  y.  Unemployed  Capital  and  Land  as  well
as  Laboîir.
One  final  statement  belongs  to  an  understanding  of
the  nature  and  magnitude  of  the  disease.  “  Unemployment”
of  labour,  waste  of  labour-power,  does  not  stand  alone.
At  the  great  periods  of  depression,  we  have  not  only
“unemployed”  labour,  but  “unemployed”  capital.  Nor
can  it  be  accounted  a  mal-adjustment  of  capital  and
labour  as  between  trade  and  trade.  The  special  characteristic ­
  of  industry  during  a  period  of  trade  depression  is
that,  not  in  this  or  that  trade,  but  over  the  general  field
of  industry,  there  is  labour-power  and  capital  lying
“unemployed.”  The  actual  phenomenon  is  a  general
excess  of  productive  power.  The  waste  of  labour-power
in  our  modern  communities  is  evidently  but  one  important ­
  aspect  of  an  even  larger  economic  problem.  This
question  is  one  we  may  well  allow  to  germinate  in  our
minds.  “  Why  is  it  that,  with  a  wheat-growing  area  so
huge  and  so  productive  that  in  good  years  whole  crops
are  left  to  rot  in  the  ground,  thousands  of  English
labourers,  millions  of  Russian  peasants,  cannot  get  enough
bread  to  eat?  Why  is  it  that  with  so  many  cotton-mills
in  Lancashire  that  they  cannot  all  be  kept  working  for
any  length  of  time  together,  thousands  of  people  in
Manchester  cannot  get  a  decent  shirt  to  their  backs?
Why  is  it  that,  with  a  growing  glut  of  mines  and  miners,
myriads  of  people  are  shivering  for  lack  of  coal?”  These
questions  are  not  conceived  in  a  spirit  of  sensationalism,
but  merely  to  bring  home  the  nature  of  the  vital  problem