580 EVENING DISCOURSES 
a change in kind—the silk stocking and feminine footwear are cases in point. 
Now even if these two classes of innovation, direct and derivative, are in 
balance, the process of absorbing them will give rise to economic growing 
pains and temporary dislocations of capital and employment, but the gains 
will rapidly outweigh the disadvantages. But when they are not in balance 
the process is more painful, and the debit to be set against progress very much 
greater. The introduction of machinery has been for three hundred years 
accompanied by the same hostile arguments, for the immediate effects in 
unemployment are much more obvious and human than the countervailing 
employment given by the released purchasing power, which may occur in 
some other place or country. Illustrations may be found all the way from 
Queen Elizabeth’s sentiments on stocking-knitting machinery to the Luddite 
riots, and the eight looms per weaver of to-day. But in the literature of the 
whole series, nothing can outdo, for detailed economic jeremiad and precise 
calculation of woe, a contemporary examination of the effect of the intro- 
duction of the stage-coach in the middle of the seventeenth century upon the 
post-horse industry and all that depended upon it. (In Grand Concern of 
England, 1673.) 
The argument so far, no doubt, begs the question of the meaning of pro- 
gress, and assumes that silk stockings and fine shoes represent ‘ higher ” 
standard of life than black homespun woollens and rough boots—a doctrine 
that is not acceptable to Mr. De Valera, for example; but as we are not 
entering the field of morals or ethical aims, we are obliged to assume that 
those objects which are actually the subject of average human desire must 
be given their economic significance accordingly, and not attempt to solve 
the larger problem simultaneously. In this sense such a mechanical 
invention as the totalisator must take its place in ‘ progress ’ at this stage. ~ 
The problem of balance, in the direct and the derivative, is not however 
so simple in practice, for the sum total of the effect of derivative innovations 
(creating technological unemployment) ought to be balanced by the sum 
total of direct innovations or increased demand for other products (new 
and expanded employment). But many direct innovations are not additive, 
they are substitutional, and destroy the need for old commodities. If combs 
are made from celluloid, and dishes from papier maché or pyrex, they will 
certainly not create a wholly additional demand or employment—there 
will be a displacement of the old types in metal or bone combs or china 
dishes. This substitution goes into rival classes of utility also, and a radio 
set may be a real substitute for a billiard table, and oil may be the enemy 
of hops, if cheap bus-riding supplants long sittings in public-houses. These 
substitutions may be gradual enough to be absorbed as a normal feature of 
progress, but if they are very rapid and coincide with certain other economic 
disturbances they may be very distressing. By ‘normal’ I mean such as 
can be coped with by the direction of new labour entering industry or new 
capital spent on renewals, leaving the contractions to take place by natural 
age attrition without unemployment, or by premature obsolescence—for the 
moment this is the optimum point of change. 
The lack of balance between derivative and direct innovation may be 
due, of course, to a terrific drive and rapidity in scientific recovery of the 
industrial type, but it is only fair to say that the excess of one may be due 
to causes on the economic side. If, for purely monetary reasons, the gold 
standard, etc., the purchasing power of money is continually increasing 
through falling prices, and, with the current inability to change the money 
totals of wages and other costs, real wages are rising, it becomes increasingly 
possible to substitute innovations of machinery for hand labour, or complex 
for simple. A change that was not worth making on a balance of old wage 
