ord, while it is
the interest of each producer of machine-made goods to give regular
employment, some wider industrial force compels him to irregularity.
What is this force? It is uncontrolled machinery. In the several units
of machine-production, the individual factories or mills, we have
admirable order and accurate adjustment of parts; in the aggregate of
machine-production we have no organisation, but a chaos of haphazard
speculation. "Industry has not yet adapted itself to the changes in
the environment produced by machinery." That is all.

Under a monetary system of commerce, though commodities still exchange
for commodities, it is an essential condition of that exchange that
those who possess purchasing power shall be willing to use a
sufficient proportion of it to demand consumptive goods. Otherwise the
production of productive goods is stimulated unduly while the demand
for consumptive goods is checked,--the condition which the business
man rightly regards as over-supply of the material forms of capital.
When production was slower, markets[193] narrower, credit less
developed, there was less danger of this big miscalculation, and the
corrective forces of industry were more speedily effective. But modern
machinery has enormously expanded the size of markets, the scale of
competition, the complexity of demand, and production is no longer for
a small, local, present demand, but for a large, world, future demand.
Hence machinery is the direct material cause of these great
fluctuations which bring, as their most evil consequence, irregularity
of wages and employment.

How far does this tend to right itself? Professor Nicholson believes
that time will compel a better adjustment between machinery and its
environment.

"The enormous development of steam communication and the spread of the
telegraph over the whole globe have caused modern industry to develop
from a gigantic star-fish, any of whose members might be destroyed
without affecting the rest, into a +mega zoon+ which is convulsed in
agony by a slight injury in one part. A depression of trade is now
felt as keenly in America and even in our colonies as it is here.
Still, in the process of time, with the increase of organisation and
decrease of unsound speculation, this extension of the market must
lead to greater stability of prices; but at present the disturbing
forces often outweigh altogether the supposed principal
elements."[194]

The organisation of c