nd
hence, an increase of production really takes place during the progress
of depreciation, as long as the existence of depreciation is not
suspected; and it is this which gives to the fallacies of the currency
school, principally represented by Mr. Attwood, all the little
plausibility they possess. But when the delusion vanishes and the truth
is disclosed, those whose commodities are relatively in excess must
diminish their production or be ruined: and if during the high prices
they have built mills and erected machinery, they will be likely to
repent at leisure.

In the present state of the commercial world, mercantile transactions
being carried on upon an immense scale, but the remote causes of
fluctuations in prices being very little understood, so that
unreasonable hopes and unreasonable fears alternately rule with
tyrannical sway over the minds of a majority of the mercantile public;
general eagerness to buy and general reluctance to buy, succeed one
another in a manner more or less marked, at brief intervals. Except
during short periods of transition, there is almost always either great
briskness of business or great stagnation; either the principal
producers of almost all the leading articles of industry have as many
orders as they can possibly execute, or the dealers in almost all
commodities have their warehouses full of unsold goods.

In this last ease, it is commonly said that there is a general
superabundance; and as those economists who have contested the
possibility of general superabundance, would none of them deny the
possibility or even the frequent occurrence of the phenomenon which we
have just noticed, it would seem incumbent on them to show, that the
expression to which they object is not applicable to a state of things
in which all or most commodities remain unsold, in the same sense in
which there is said to be a superabundance of any one commodity when it
remains in the warehouses of dealers for want of a market.

This is merely a question of naming, but an important one, as it seems
to us that much apparent difference of opinion has been produced by a
mere difference in the mode of describing the same facts, and that
persons who at bottom were perfectly agreed, have considered each other
as guilty of gross error, and sometimes oven misrepresentation, on this
subject.

In order to afford the explanations, with which it is necessary to take
the doctrine of the impossibility of an excess of a