orkers, and a far larger percentage of
unskilled workers, are out of employment for months together, these
figures measure the economic malady of "unemployment," which is in no
sense compensated by the full or excessive labour of periods of better
trade.

Sec. 7. Our reasoning from the ascertained tendencies of
machine-production points to the conclusion that, having regard to the
two prime constituents in demand for labour, the number of those
employed, and the regularity of employment, machinery does not, under
present conditions, generally favour an increased steady demand for
labour. It tends to drive an increased proportion of labour in three
directions.

(1) To the invention, construction, and maintenance of machinery to
make machines, the labour of machine-making being continually
displaced by machines, and being thus driven to the production of
machines more remote from the machines directly engaged in producing
consumptive goods. The labour thus engaged must be in an
ever-diminishing proportion to a given quantity of consumption.
Nothing but a great increase in the quantity of consumption, or the
opening of new varieties of consumption, can maintain or increase the
demand for labour in these machine-making industries.

(2) To continual specialisation, subdivision, and refinement in the
arts of distribution. The multiplication of merchants, agents,
retailers, which, in spite of forces making for centralisation in
distributive work, is so marked a feature in the English industry of
the last forty years, is a natural result of the influence of
machinery, in setting free from "making" processes an increased
proportion of labour.

(3) To the supply of new forms of wealth, which are either (_a_)
wholly non-material--_i.e._, intellectual, artistic, or other personal
services; (_b_) partly non-material--_e.g._, works of art or skill,
whose value consists chiefly in the embodiment of individual taste or
spontaneous energy, or (_c_) too irregular or not sufficiently
extended in demand to admit the application of machinery. The learned
professions, art, science, and literature, and those branches of
labour engaged in producing luxuries and luxurious services furnish a
constantly increasing employment, though the supply of labour is so
notoriously in excess of the demand in all such employments that a
large percentage of unemployment is chronic.

So long then as a community grows in numbers, so long as individuals