6 THE ECONOMICS OF UNEMPLOYMENT
of some twenty million or more men called to arms (compensated but partially by the fuller employment of the remaining civil populations), the destruction and extravagence of war raised the level of consump- tion far above the pre-war level. Even after the war, the high rate of public and private consumption kept in full employment for several years the fighting men as they returned to productive occupations. Then the postponed depression came, with all those special characteristics upon which so many critics wrongly fasten as the sole source of the trouble.
Now the chief economic lesson which the war should teach relates to the power of high consumption to maintain production. This it teaches by an extreme case. The artificially enhanced consumption of these seven years not merely postponed the depression that was due, but kept the available productive powers of capital and labour in every belligerent and neutral country fully and continuously employed. The des- truction and extravagence of war, of course, exceeded the strained productivity of the belligerents, leaving them at its close with reduced capital resources of their own, and heavily in debt to neutrals whose surplus produce they had borrowed to enhance their war-consumption. This excessive rate of consumption could perhaps not have continued indefinitely, even had the neutral world been willing and able to continue handing over their surplus produce in the hope of eventual repayment.
But the war made it evident that the quantity of slack normally present in the operation of the economic system was far greater than had been supposed, and
