UNEMPLOYMENT. Unfortunately, during the years 1904–1905 there was a very severe economic crisis which was the cause of widespread unemployment, and Glasgow and the West suffered severely. Such economic crises had been periodic during the past century, and differed materially from those which occurred in earlier centuries. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century economic crises were really due to actual scarcity of foodstuffs, and people went hungry as much because there was not enough food to go round as because they had no money with which to buy their share of what there was. Thus, in Scotland, until about the close of the Napoleonic wars, the periods of comparative plenty or of scarcity depended largely on the character of the seasons. While it is true that the common people were always in want, in bad seasons they died of starvation. With the coming of the industrial era, however, there took place a gradual change. While prices still depended on the seasons, and were moderately or extravagantly high as the seasons were good or bad, there entered into the problem a new factor, and the people became poor and were unable to purchase _because they had produced too much_ and there was not an effective market for the goods. As it has been tersely put: “The shoemaker’s children went barefoot because their father had produced too many boots; and the tailor’s, naked, because he had made too many clothes.” This was a new phenomenon for which history provides no parallel, and it has persisted, ever increasing in intensity, until towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century as many as 42 per cent. of the breadwinners in a respectable working-class district in the East-End of Glasgow have been found to be unemployed at the same time. These periods of unemployment seem to be in the form of more or less regularly recurring cycles. There is first a gradually increasing inflation of the volume of trade. New works are started, old works are enlarged, and everywhere there is a boom, until the zenith is reached. Then comes a gradual slackening off. The supply of goods has outstripped the limits of effective demand and sales gradually decline as warehouses become full. The rate of slackening increases; statisticians begin to watch the rapidly ascending unemployment curve, which in itself does not record the full slackening, as many workers are on short time. This increase of unemployment still further weakens the effective demand for goods and still further accelerates the growth of unemployment, with the result that in about another year the unemployment crisis is reached, soup kitchens and relief works open; thousands of hitherto steady workmen become derelicts—and the huge commercial and industrial concerns take advantage of the slackness to squeeze small rivals out of business or to swallow them up, while at the same time improving their own machinery of production.