[Footnote 1: Towards the end of August, the tin-plate and steel-sheet trade in this country which had suffered badly on the outbreak of war revived, and "several mills were reopened, owing to the obtaining of orders which formerly went to Germany" (_Board of Trade Labour Gazette_, Sept. 1914, p. 330).] [Footnote 2: _Round Table_, Sept. 1914, pp. 708-9.] [Footnote 3: This, of course, does not mean that Great Britain will "capture" German trade and increase its foreign commerce by the amount of its value.] 2. _Unemployment and Short Time_.--We are now able to understand how the war has affected the individual workman. As we have seen, the panic caused by the outbreak of war and the collapse of the remittance market meant in many industries the holding up of production and the stoppage of the workman's wages. If it had not been possible to restart the machinery of exchange, starvation would have walked through the land, and the industries dependent on foreign raw material would have closed down altogether. As it was, the inevitable dislocation increased the amount of unemployment.[1] Whereas the trade union percentage[2] of unemployment amongst their members was only 2.8 at the end of July, it had reached 7.1 by the end of August. This figure, however, is considerably below the percentage of unemployed during many periods of trade depression; the average for the whole of 1908 was 7.8 and for 1909, 7.7, whilst during the month of March 1912 it rose to 11.3 as a result of the coal strike. [Footnote 1: Note that unemployment prior to the war was showing a tendency to increase.] [Footnote 2: It should be observed that these figures relate only to about a million trade unionists, no non-unionists being included. Further, they ignore short time.]