or a time, and then draws with accumulated power.

Times of industrial depression and commercial disasters are occurring
over and over again. Some economists attribute them to the peculiar
industrial and monetary conditions of the periods in which they
occur; but they have seldom agreed as to the causes of any particular
panic. They are so regular in their recurrence that some economists
have thought they must be produced by some constant cause; like the
moon causing the tides of the ocean. Both are true. There is a general
and there is also a secondary or superficial cause.

The times of greatest commercial disasters in this country were in the
years 1809, 1818, 1837, 1873, 1893.

The political economists can assign as reasons some peculiar
conditions prevailing in each of these periods, but the wisest have
never gone deep enough to discover the general cause; this constant
centralizing draft of usury.

In these periods of commercial disaster there is no destruction of
property. There is only a general shake up and redistribution. All the
wealth of the country remains, but after the disaster wealth is always
found to be in fewer hands. Some have become rich, many who were
thought to be wealthy are ruined, and the number of the poor has been
multiplied.

A patient may be afflicted with some deep-seated, chronic disease that
makes him very easily affected by a change of the weather, by a change
of his diet or of his bed, and these may be assigned as the causes of
his frequent relapses, and they are the immediate or secondary
causes, but the real cause is the deep-seated, chronic disease. Cure
that disease and the changes in conditions, now so serious, would not
be noticed by the healthy man.

The real and constant cause of our recurring financial disasters is
this centralizing usury that directly opposes the distribution of
wealth that is natural, when the producers of wealth are permitted to
receive and enjoy it. Root out this evil, and then the trifling
differences in our harvests, changes in our tariff laws, currency
legislation, and the score of other things that now affect us, would
be unfelt by the healthy body politic.

If this centralizing power is destroyed then the natural distribution
would be undisturbed, and these, so-called, panics would be unknown.

CHAPTER XXX.

MAMMON DOMINATES THE NATIONS.

The debt habit has been diligently cultivated and encouraged, until
the nations are enslaved.