§ 5. (_b_) Whether machinery, apart from the changes due to its introduction, favours regularity or irregularity of employment, is a question to which a tolerably definite answer can be given. The structure of the individual factory, with its ever-growing quantity of expensive machinery, would seem at first sight to furnish a direct guarantee of regular employment, based upon the self-interest of the capitalist. Some of the "sweating" trades of London are said to be maintained by the economy which can be effected by employers who use no expensive plant or machinery, and who are able readily to increase or diminish the number of their employees so as to keep pace with the demands of some "season" trade, such as fur-pulling or artificial flowers. When the employer has charge of enormous quantities of fixed capital, his individual interest is strongly in favour of full and regular employment of labour. On this account, then, machinery would seem to favour regularity of employment. On the other hand, Professor Nicholson has ample evidence in support of his statement that "great fluctuations in price occur in those commodities which require for their production a large proportion of fixed capital. These fluctuations in prices are accompanied by corresponding fluctuations in wages and irregularity of employment."[192] In a word, while it is the interest of each producer of machine-made goods to give regular employment, some wider industrial force compels him to irregularity. What is this force? It is uncontrolled machinery. In the several units of machine-production, the individual factories or mills, we have admirable order and accurate adjustment of parts; in the aggregate of machine-production we have no organisation, but a chaos of haphazard speculation. "Industry has not yet adapted itself to the changes in the environment produced by machinery." That is all. Under a monetary system of commerce, though commodities still exchange for commodities, it is an essential condition of that exchange that those who possess purchasing power shall be willing to use a sufficient proportion of it to demand consumptive goods. Otherwise the production of productive goods is stimulated unduly while the demand for consumptive goods is checked,--the condition which the business man rightly regards as over-supply of the material forms of capital. When production was slower, markets[193] narrower, credit less developed, there was less danger of this big miscalculation, and the corrective forces of industry were more speedily effective. But modern machinery has enormously expanded the size of markets, the scale of competition, the complexity of demand, and production is no longer for a small, local, present demand, but for a large, world, future demand. Hence machinery is the direct material cause of these great fluctuations which bring, as their most evil consequence, irregularity of wages and employment.