Broadly the industries first affected in either direction were those with big export trade, though textile industries, hosiery, and the non-ferrous metal industry showed some early tendencies without having large exports. The consumer goods industries, other than clothing and bread, reached their maximum of unemployment and began their recovery before the construction al industries.
Textiles and tinplates were again leading the way in the rise of unemployment as they did eight years ago. The order in which industries felt the depression was not necessarily the same as the order of the intensity with which it was likely to affect them. Textiles and tinplates led the way even in the depression of 1908 and 1909, and constructional spending far more than it could expect to raise as revenue without taxing industries and estates into idleness—that is, fiscally speaking, out of existence.
If we find no means of putting an end to the extraordinary necessity of spending more and more upon unproductive objects we may yet fulfil Adam Smith's eighteenth-century prediction that the States of Europe would very likely collapse through debt.
For that matter the States of America, though so admirably placed to avoid Old World entanglements, are not very far behindhand in the incurring of debt. In such a world the public financial problem of any one particular country, though seemingly grave in itself, is to be judged against the background of other people's equally or only less grave problem, states the "Manchester Guardian."
France has particularly conspicuous financial problems which result in Ministerial: resignations and in continuous political skirmishing between capitalists who withhold their resources from the circulation of business and labour organizations which withhold their industry from the general effort of the country. Unlike some other countries, France has not installed an Executive so Powerful as to be able to constrain all citizens to the greatest effort and the fullest participation of which they tre capable, and at the same time to a cut in their consumption when there is less than enough of consumable goods to go round. In those highly disciplined countries, Governments may be incurring debt on a, great scale because they do not choose to use their powers of constraint to the full. They therefore choose an easier way for the moment, paying the State's way with LO.U.s of one sort or another, but not disclosing the total of the debts thus incurred. At the date of maturity they will rely upon being able to screw up production and to screw down consumption sufficiently to provide the wherewithal.
Moreover, as the "Frankfurter Zeitung" puts it, in a denial of the possibility of a serious Stock Exchange crisis in Germany, "It is impossible that there should be a money shortage in a country ruled like Germany, where the State has the possibility of utilizing the credit-creating facilities of the banks to the full for its own purposes and designs."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.