The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

CO-ORDINATED INDUSTRY 27

that the most urgent step was to set the textile mills going. They collect the evidence of the potential demand. With the credit legally at their disposal, they arrange for the delivery of these textile goods to the five million housewives concerned. How does it work ?

The ships carry more cotton to Liverpool. The ships consume more coal, more oil, employ more engineers and sailors. The operatives get busy. More wages, like red blood, flow through the veins of industry. Machinery wears out. More machinery is ordered. Young couples decide to marry. They order furniture; actually order more cotton goods. The furniture workers get busy. Their young men marry. More furniture machinery is called for. More iron and steel is in demand; more coal. Every trade in the Kingdom gradually benefits. The unemployed are absorbed. Wages rise. And the original order that set the movement going is paid, not out of current wages but out of the rise in wages, resulting from healthy industrial processes.

Thus, by a friend of mine telling me at the psychological moment that he required a few pillow-slips and sheets, he has set in train a series of industrial movements that have absorbed two million unemployed. Not by any artificial stimulation of the market but by the sound economic method of allying credit with naturaldemand. The adjustment of the economic factors comes first; the extension of employment logically follows.