TKAXSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 817 



has not ruucli diminished. Agricultural labour, in somewhat greater proportion 

 than before, has been obliged to seek other employments; the flow of population 

 from country to town has been increased somewhat ; but nothing new has happened 

 to diminish production generally to a serious extent, and it is a new cause, it must 

 be remembered, for which we are seeking. As far as unfavourable weather is con- 

 cerned, again, that is only a temporary evil. One year with another, the weather 

 is not worse now than at any former time ; the remarkably unfavourable weather 

 which lasted from 1874 to 1880 has passed. The other conditions unfavourable to 

 agriculture, especially foreign competition, are more enduring ; but these seem 

 much more unfavourable to rent than to production itself, which is the point now 

 under consideration; and we do not know that they will be permanent at all when 

 prices and wages are fully adjusted. 



The disturbance to industry by the fall of prices generally is also a vera causa 

 of a check to the rate of material growth. But the effect of such a cause seems to 

 be confined witliin narrow limits, and it is not a new cause. It occurs in every 

 time of depression due to discredit, being partly the effect and partly the cause of 

 the depression itself. All that is new recently is the extreme degree of the fall, 

 and I must express the greatest doubt whether a mere difference of degree aggra- 

 vates materially the periodical disturbance of industry, tending to check production, 

 which a fall of prices from a high to a low level causes. So far as past experience 

 has gone, at any rate, no such cause has been known to check production to any 

 material extent. If any such cause tended to have a serious effect we should 

 witness the results every time there is a shrinkage of values owing to the contrac- 

 tion and appreciation of an inconvertible paper currency, and I am not aware of 

 any such contraction having had the effect described on production, though the eflect 

 in producing a feeling of depression is beyond all question. The facts as to the great 

 contraction in this country between 1815 and 1820 are on record, while the 

 experience of the United States after the civil war is also fresh in everyone's recol- 

 lection. Contraction of currency and fall of prices, though they are painful things, 

 do not stop production materially. 



Another explanation suggested is that there is in fact no antecedent reason for 

 supposing that the rate of material growth in a community should always be at the 

 same rate — that a community may, as it were, get ' to the top ' as regards its 

 development under given conditions, and then its advance shoidd be either less 

 rapid than it had been or it should even become stationary. The defect of this 

 explanation is that it assumes the very thing which would have to be proved. 

 Is there any other sign except the alleged check to the rate of our material growth 

 itself that in or about the year 1875 this country got ' to the top ' ? It has, more- 

 over, to be considered that on a priori grounds it is most unlikely a community 

 would get to the top per saltum, and then so great a change should occur as the 

 apparent change we are considering. The persistence of internal conditions in a 

 given mass of humanity is a thing we may safely assume, and if these conditions 

 are consistent with a given rate of development in one period of ten years, it is most 

 unlikely that, save for an alteration of external conditions, there would be another 

 rate of development in the succeeding ten years. Human nature and capacities do 

 not change like that. Scientific opinion, I believe, is also to the effect that the 

 progress of invention and of the practical working of inventions, which have been 

 the main cause of our material growth in the past, have been going on in the last 

 ten j^ears, are still going on, and are likely to go on in the near future, at as great 

 a rate as at any time ui the last fifty years. Except, as already said, the apparent 

 check to the rate of our material growth itself, there is no sign anywhere of our 

 having got to the top, so that a stationary condition economically, or a condition 

 nearly approaching it, has been reached. 



Last of all, it is urged that the diminution in the rate of material growth, which is 

 in question, must be due to the fact that we are losing the natural advantages of coal 

 and iron which we formerly had in comparison with the rest of the world. This is 

 perhaps only another way of saying that we have got to the top by comparison, 

 though the community of nations generally has not got to the top, and another way 

 of saying also that foreign competition affects us more than it formerly did ; an 



1887. 3q 



