XII THE DEPRESSION OF TRADE 207 



reduce their outlay on all the staple manufactures of the 

 country. In clothing, furniture, and everything in fact 

 that makes life agreeable, they are obliged to economise, 

 simply because it is more easy to economise in these than 

 in absolute food. Therefore all over the country there is 

 a diminution in the demand for the staple products of the 

 country ; but when this money is accumulated, and 

 goes into the hands of a few speculators, it is spent on 

 different things — on ornaments, entertainments, yachts, 

 horse-racing, foreign travel, and hundreds of other ways, 

 — it is spent on that which all economists tell us, and per- 

 fectly truly, is the most unproductive kind of expenditure. 

 Consequently the loss to the manufactures and trade of 

 the country by every million of money transferred from 

 the industrious working or middle classes to rich specu- 

 lators is enormous, and is thus a real cause of depression 

 of trade. I think I am therefore quite justified in main- 

 taining, that, although it is certain that the aggregate 

 wealth of the country has been steadily increasing all 

 these years, still that wealth has been becoming more 

 unequally distributed, and that inequality is the direct 

 cause of a large proportion of depression of trade. 



Depression of Trade in America. 



Now I did not mention it at first, but I may mention 

 now, that the reason is very clear why the depression 

 which affected us should affect all other great commercial 

 countries of Europe and America. It is because all the 

 causes which I enumerated as producing depression of 

 trade as regards our foreign commerce would affect all 

 those other countries just as well — that is, they have 

 produced a real impoverishment of the peoples who were 

 customers both of ourselves and other manufacturing 

 countries. Therefore the causes acted in the same way 

 on France, Germany, and America as they did with us, 

 to the extent that their manufactures went abroad to 

 other countries. 



But there have been some special causes affecting 

 America which account for the remarkable fact that. 



