358 THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT bk. vi

other article. Thus if currency notes were to be de-prived of their liquidity-premium by the stampingsystem, a long series of substitutes would step into theirshoes—bank-money, debts at call, foreign money, jewel-lery and the precious metals generally, and so forth.As I have mentioned above, there have been times whenit was probably the craving for the ownership of land,independently of its yield, which served to keep upthe rate of interest;—though under Gesell’s systemthis possibility would have been eliminated by landnationalisation.

VII

The theories which we have examined above aredirected, in substance, to the constituent of effectivedemand which depends on the sufficiency of the in-ducement to invest. It is no new thing, however, toascribe the evils of unemployment to the insufficiencyof the other constituent, namely, the insufficiency of thepropensity to consume. But this alternative explana-tion of the economic evils of the day—equally un-popular with the classical economists—played a muchsmaller part in sixteenth- and seventeenth-centurythinking and has only gathered force in comparativelyrecent times.

Though complaints of under-consumption were avery subsidiary aspect of mercantilist thought, ProfessorHeckscher quotes a number of examples of what hecalls “the deep-rooted belief in the utility of luxuryand the evil of thrift. Thrift, in fact, was regarded asthe cause of unemployment, and for two reasons: in thefirst place, because real income was believed to diminishby the amount of money which did not enter intoexchange, and secondly, because saving was believedto withdraw money from circulation.” 1 In 1598Laffemas (Les Tresors et richesses pour mettre I'Estat enSplendeur ) denounced the objectors to the use of

1 Heckscher, op. cit. vol. ii. p. 208.