UNEMPLOYMENT
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Your last excuse for your last explanation of the decay of British industry is already known to be quite mistaken. I refer to rationalization.
Take the cotton trade, the most highly rationalized in the world, and it has been so during my sixty years' experience of it. All the great combines—rationalized thirty years ago —and not watered in the 1920 boom—are rapidly going into insolvency. I refer you to one of many, the Fine Cotton Spinners' and Doublers' Association, Ltd., with the best technical brains and the best machinery and plant in the world. This concern is now making no profits : dividend 1928, 15 per cent. ; 1929, 10 per cent. ; and now 6 per cent. In spite of large reserves it is rapidly decaying. The increased unemployment is not due to rationalization, for, as I say, that has always been in existence, at any rate for the last thirty years. You must look to decreased trade for the explanation. On the top of the deflation here the financiers have added further deflation here and abroad, producing world-wide bad trade. That is the cause, and events will prove I am right. There is no over-production of goods ; there is under-production of money, some of it caused by the turning of the people's Treasury notes and the with- drawal of bank credit in order to double the wealth of Farasitic financiers. After reading the Spectator for fifty years I am ashamed of its fiscal and financial views. They
[This letter exemplifies the fallacy which is holding back the rationalization 'of the industry. Sixty years ago the English cotton trade was the most highly efficient in the world. To- day it is not.—ED. Spectator.]
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