ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

336

It happens that we have before us, to-day, inthe position of the Coal Industry, an object-lesson of the results of the confusion of ideaswhich now prevails. On the one side theTreasury and the Bank of England are pursu-ing an orthodox nineteenth-century policy basedon the assumption that economic adjustmentscan and ought to be brought about by the freeplay of the forces of supply and demand. TheTreasury and the Bank of England still believe—or, at any rate, did until a week or two ago—that the things, which would follow on theassumption of free competition and the mobilityof capital and labour, actually occur in theeconomic life of to-day.

On the other side, not only the facts, butpublic opinion also, have moved a long distanceaway in the direction of Professor Commons’sepoch of Stabilisation. The Trade Unions arestrong enough to interfere with the free play ofthe forces of supply and demand, and PublicOpinion , albeit with a grumble and with morethan a suspicion that the Trade Unions aregrowing dangerous, supports the Trade Unions in their main contention that Coalminers oughtnot to be the victims of cruel economic forceswhich they never set in motion.

The idea of the old-world party, that you can,for example, alter the value of money and thenleave the consequential adjustments to be broughtabout by the forces of supply and demand, be-longs to the days of fifty or a hundred years agowhen Trade Unions were powerless, and when