DISTURBANCES OF EQUALISING TENDENCY OF COMMERCE 5 
general, the more complete the system of communications the more 
aearly equal are prices. 
12. Now it has to be noted that while the tendency of commerce is 
towards comparative steadiness in prices, yet the level towards which 
she price tends is not the lowest level in any place of production. 
Merchants sell abroad because they can thus get a better price than 
at home. It is their quest after higher prices that reduces the in- 
equality under this head in different parts of the world. To them 
she advantage of an extended commerce is this, that the wider the 
commerce the greater is their choice of customers.  . 
13. Hence there follows a third great result of the growth of com- 
merce, namely, the development of the resources of different regions to 
‘he utmost extent possible under the existing conditions, whatever these 
may be, and with this development the keenest and most widespread 
competition, which is, indeed, only another aspect of the same great 
fact. 
14. But in process of this development it becomes apparent that 
the equalising tendency of commerce on which we have insisted is 
only a general tendency, which is apt to be masked now and again by 
disturbances, by great variations in price, due directly or indirectly to 
the operations of commerce itself. 
These disturbances may arise from inventions causing a sudden 
cheapening in the processes of production, such as the great textile 
inventions or those which gave rise to the modern methods of steel- 
making (531-5) ; they may arise from the introduction of cheaper 
means of transport, and the disturbance due to this cause is felt all the 
more keenly when the cheaper transport is to regions in which there is 
exceptionally cheap labour or cheap land, and still more when it leads 
bo the rapid settlement of land of unused and extraordinary fertility ; 
or they may arise from a vast and rapid expansion of the demand for 
some commodity—an expansion such as is only possible since commerce 
has come to be pursued on the extensive scale characteristic of the 
present time. 
15. Such disturbances are sure to inflict hardship somewhere. The 
transition from domestic industry in spinning and weaving to the fac- 
bory system is too far in the past in our own country for the attendant 
hardships of that transition to be remembered, or even generally 
mown ; but these hardships are still being felt in some parts of the 
Continent, as in Germany (841) and Russia (915). In India we have, 
first of all, seen hand-spinners and weavers starved out of existence by 
she commerce in English machine-made cottons, and subsequently a 
vigorous competition with our own cottons in the East arise from the 
development of a mechanical textile industry based on local advan- 
bages (377). The effects of other causes of disturbance are illustrated 
in the recent history of the wheat trade, with reference to which see 
bars. 246-67, where an explanation is attempted of the circumstances