s 84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pounds sterling, or $1,250,000 per week, to the whole people of the 

 Kingdom, to be spent for other things. 



The evidence is also conclusive that the ability of the population 

 of the world to consume is greater than ever before, and is rapidly in- 

 creasing. Indeed, such a conclusion is a corollary from the acknowl- 

 edged fact of increased production the end and object of all produc- 

 tion being consumption. Take, for example, the United States, with 

 its present population of sixty million a population that undoubt- 

 edly produces and consumes more per head than any other equal num- 

 ber of people on the face of the globe, and is producing and consum- 

 ing very much more than it did ten or even five years ago. The 

 business of exchanging the products or services, and of satisfying 

 thereby the wants of such a people is, therefore, necessarily immense, 

 and with the annual increase of population, and with consuming power 

 increasing in an even larger ratio, the volume of such business must 

 continue to increase. And what is true of the United States is true, 

 in a greater or less degree, of all the other nations of the globe. There 

 is, therefore, nothing inconsistent or mysterious in the maintenance or 

 increase in the volume of the world's business contemporaneously 

 with a depression of trade in the sense of a reduction of profits 

 occasioned by an intense competition to dispose of commodities, which 

 have been produced under comparatively new conditions in excess of 

 a satisfactory remunerative demand in the world's markets. 



The popular sentiment which has instinctively attributed the re- 

 markable disturbance of trade within recent years to the more remark- 

 able changes which have taken place concurrently in the methods of 

 production and distribution has, therefore, not been mistaken. The 

 almost instinctive efforts of producers everywhere to arrest what they 

 consider " bad trade " by partially or wholly interrupting production 

 has not been inexpedient ; and the use of the word " over-produc- 

 tion," stripped of its looseness of expression, and in the sense as defined 

 by the British Commission (and as heretofore shown), is not inappro- 

 priate in discussing the economic phenomena under consideration. It 

 would also seem as if much of the bewilderment that is still attendant 

 upon this subject, and the secret of the fruitlessness of most of the 

 elaborate inquiries that have been instituted concerning it, have been 

 due mainly to an inability to distinguish clearly between a causation 

 that is primary, all-sufficient, and which has acted in the nature of 

 unity, and causes which are in the nature of sequences or derivatives. 

 One striking illustration of this is to be found in the tendency of 

 many of the English writers and investigators to consider the immense 

 losses which British farming capital has experienced since 1873, as alone 

 sufficient to account for all the disturbances to which trade and indus- 

 try in the United Kingdom have been subjected during the same pe- 

 riod. That such losses have been extensive and disastrous without 

 precedent, is not to be questioned. Sir James Caird estimates this loss 



