It is the auxiliary capital that represents the bulk of over-supply, and whose idleness signifies the enforced unemployment of large masses of labour. It is machinery, made and designed to increase the flow of productive goods, that has multiplied too fast for the growth of consumption. This machinery does not continue in full use, a large proportion of it is not required to assist in producing the quantity of consumptive goods which can find a market, and must of necessity stand idle; it represents a quantity of useless forms of capital, over-supply, and its unused productive power represents an incomparably larger amount of potential over-supply of goods. Economic forces are at work preventing the continuation of the use of this excessive machinery; if it were used in defiance of these forces, if its owners could afford to keep it working, there would be no market for the goods it would turn out, and these too would swell the mass of over-supply. [Illustration: GENERAL FOOD PRICES.] [Illustration: MINERAL PRICES.] § 6. The general relation of modern Machinery to Commercial Depression is found to be as follows:--Improved machinery of manufacture and transport enables larger and larger quantities of raw material to pass more quickly and more cheaply through the several processes of production. Consumers do not, in fact, increase their consumption as quickly and to an equal extent. Hence the onward flow of productive goods is checked in one or more of the manufacturing stages, or in the hands of the merchant, or even in the retail shop. This congestion of the channels of production automatically checks production, depriving of all use a large quantity of the machinery, and a large quantity of labour. The general fall of money income which has necessarily followed from a fall of prices, uncompensated by a corresponding expansion of sales, induces a shrinkage of consumption. Under depressed trade, while the markets continue to be glutted with unsold goods, only so much current production is maintained as will correspond to the shrunk consumption of the depressed community. Before the turn in the commercial tide, current production even falls below the level of current consumption, thus allowing for the gradual passage into consumption of the glut of goods which had congested the machine. After the congestion which had kept prices low is removed, prices begin to rise, demand is more active at each point of industry, and we see the usual symptoms of reviving trade. [Illustration: TEXTILE PRICES.] This is an accurate account of the larger phenomena visible in the commercial world in a period of disturbance. When the disease is at its worst, the activity of producer and consumer at its lowest, we have the functional condition of under-production due to the pressure of a quantity of over-supply, and we have a corresponding state of under-consumption.