RECENT  INDUSTRIAL  HISTORY  63
§  y.  The  Testimony  of  Recent  Industrial  History.
The  one  fact  which  emerges  with  striking  clearness
from  the  whole  investigation  of  the  period  1875-1885  is
that  the  producing-power  of  capital  and  labour,  to  which
full  employment  was  given  in  the  years  immediately
following  the  Franco-German  war,  was  found  excessive
in  quantity  during  the  ten  years  which  ensued.  The
same  trade-malady—general  under-employment  of  capital
and  labour—has  been  plainly  visible  since  1890.  In
trade  after  trade  it  has  been  made  manifest  that  the
capacity  of  production  is  far  in  advance  of  the  current
or  expected  demand  at  a  profitable  price,  and  in  all  of
them  brief  bursts  of  activity  have  alternated  with  long
periods  of  torpor,  during  which  weaker  mills,  mines  and
works  are  closed,  while  others  are  working  short  time,
and  large  bodies  of  workers  are  kept  half-employed.  In
three  staple  industries,  docks,  cotton,  coal-mining,  the
attempts  to  fully  utilise  existing  powers  of  production
were  directly  responsible  for  prolonged  stoppages,  during
which  the  congestion  was  relieved  at  a  terrible  cost  of
suffering  to  the  workers.  A  strike  or  a  lock-out,  attributable  to
a  fall  of  prices,  would,  as  we  have  seen,  rightly  rank  as  so  much
“  unemployment”  in  any  true  economic  analysis,  though
the  immediate  cause  might  be  a  disagreement  between
capital  and  labour  in  reference  to  wages  or  other  terms
of  employment.  All  business  men  are  compelled  to  admit
that  at  the  present  time  there  exists,  not  in  this  industry
or  that,  but  in  all  the  important  industries  of  the  country,
a  considerably  larger  quantity  of  plant  and  labour  than
can  be  profitably  employed.  A  general  consensus  of
practical  opinion  would  sustain  the  judgment  recently