The house of Industry : a new estate of the realm

62 THE HOUSE OF INDUSTRY

returns. It is in the so-called law of diminishing returns—it is not a law; it is an inference from commercial experience—that we discover the reverse process, namely either a diminishing effective demand, or a diminishing profit, which may lead to reduced production, and so a return to intrinsic values commercially less and less exploited, with a consequent increase in unemployment. Now, in the case of the staple industries, we do not have to ascertain whether there is a natural demand awaiting credit; we know it. Nor would any man assert that, because there is no commercial demand, a new ship on the Clyde - or Tyne is of less intrinsic value than an old tramp that has been floundering for twenty years through the Seven Seas, picking up precarious cargoes from port to port. The same consideration applies to most of the products of our staple industries. Everywhere the product of to-day is almost universally better than its counterpart of yesterday. Of all these goods, be they massive or minute, as of the workers who make them, it can be said, not only that “‘ No man hath hired me,”’ but that no man will choose the better thing. The inexorable truth of any living industrial system is that nothing but the best suffices. When that system is content with the second-best, a power greater than ourselves pronounces doom, inscribing “‘Ichabod’”’ where those who run may read. It is astonishing how quickly the news spreads.

This unwanted ship on the Clyde (if it is not