ting producer that he can get a market for his goods, even when
justified by events, is no guarantee against excessive production in
the whole trade.

If, then, those who have the power to consume in the present desire to
postpone their consumption they will refuse to demand consumptive
goods, and will instead bring into existence an excess of productive
goods.

Sec. 10. The diagram on next page may serve more clearly to indicate the
quantitative maladjustment of Consuming and Saving which constitutes
under-consumption, and exhibits itself in a plethora of machinery and
productive goods.

[Illustration: MECHANISM OF PRODUCTION.]

A, B, C, D, E represent the several stages through which the raw
material obtained from Nature passes on its way to the position of a
consumer's utility. The five stages represent the five leading
processes in production--the extractive process, transport,
manufacture, wholesale and retail trade. The raw materials extracted
at A, the wheat, skins, iron, timber, cotton, etc., obtained from
various quarters of the globe, are gathered together in large
quantities into places where they undergo various transformations of
shape and character; they are then distributed by wholesale and retail
merchants, who hand them over to persons who consume them as bread,
boots, kettles, chairs, shirts. The extractive, transport,
manufacturing, and merchant stages may of course be subdivided into
many complex processes, as applied to the history of the more
elaborately-produced commodities. But at each point in the process of
production there must stand a quantity of plant and machinery designed
to assist in moving the productive goods a single step further on the
road towards consumption. This fixed capital is denoted by the black
circles placed at the points A, B, C, D, E. But each machine, or
factory building, or warehouse is itself the ultimate product of a
series of steps which constitute a process similar to that denoted by
the main channel of production. Consisting in raw material extracted
from nature, the machinery and plant are built up by a number of
productive stages, which correspond to A, B, C, D, E, into the
completed shapes of fixed capital, adjusted to the positions where
they can give the proper impulse to the main tide of production. Each
productive stage in the production of plant or machinery requires the
presence of other plant and machinery to assist its progress. Each of
these se