any degree
unfamiliar or that any serious fault is found with the captains of
industry for so shutting off the industrial process and letting the
industrial equipment lie waste. As all men know, the exigencies of
business will not tolerate production to supply the community's needs
under these circumstances; although, as is equally notorious, these
slack times, when production of goods is unadvisable on grounds of
business expediency, are commonly times of wide-spread privation, "hard
times," in the community at large, when the failure of the supply is
keenly felt.

It is not that the captains of industry are at fault in so failing, or
refusing, to supply the needs of the community under these
circumstances, but only that they are helpless under the exigencies of
business. They can not supply the goods except for a price, indeed not
except for a remunerative price, a price which will add something to the
capital values which they are venturing in their various enterprises. So
long as the exigencies of price and of pecuniary gain rule the case,
there is manifestly no escaping this enforced idleness of the country's
productive forces.

It may not be out of place also to remark, by way of parenthesis, that
this highly productive state of the industrial arts, which is embodied
in the industrial plant and processes that so are systematically and
advisedly retarded or arrested under the rule of business, is at the
same time the particular pride of civilised men and the most tangible
achievement of the civilised world.

A conservative estimate of this one item of capitalistic sabotage could
scarcely appraise it at less than a twenty-five percent reduction from
the normally possible productive capacity of the community, at an
average over any considerable period; and a somewhat thorough review of
the pertinent facts would probably persuade any impartial observer that,
one year with another, such businesslike enforced idleness of plant and
personnel lowers the actual output of the country's industry by
something nearer fifty percent of its ordinary capacity when fully
employed. To many, such an assertion may seem extravagant, but with
further reflection on the well-known facts in the case it will seem less
so in proportion as the unfamiliarity of it wears off.

However, the point of attention in the case is not the precise, nor the
approximate, percentages of this arrest and retardation, this partial
neutralisation of mode