ver yet could, though I have
studied the matter a great deal, how such shrewd fellows as your
contemporaries appear to have been in many respects ever came to
entrust the business of providing for the community to a class whose
interest it was to starve it. I assure you that the wonder with us is,
not that the world did not get rich under such a system, but that it
did not perish outright from want. This wonder increases as we go on
to consider some of the other prodigious wastes that characterized it.

"Apart from the waste of labor and capital by misdirected industry,
and that from the constant bloodletting of your industrial warfare,
your system was liable to periodical convulsions, overwhelming alike
the wise and unwise, the successful cut-throat as well as his victim.
I refer to the business crises at intervals of five to ten years,
which wrecked the industries of the nation, prostrating all weak
enterprises and crippling the strongest, and were followed by long
periods, often of many years, of so-called dull times, during which
the capitalists slowly regathered their dissipated strength while the
laboring classes starved and rioted. Then would ensue another brief
season of prosperity, followed in turn by another crisis and the
ensuing years of exhaustion. As commerce developed, making the nations
mutually dependent, these arises became world-wide, while the
obstinacy of the ensuing state of collapse increased with the area
affected by the convulsions, and the consequent lack of rallying
centres. In proportion as the industries of the world multiplied and
became complex, and the volume of capital involved was increased,
these business cataclysms became more frequent, till, in the latter
part of the nineteenth century, there were two years of bad times to
one of good, and the system of industry, never before so extended or
so imposing, seemed in danger of collapsing by its own weight. After
endless discussions, your economists appear by that time to have
settled down to the despairing conclusion that there was no more
possibility of preventing or controlling these crises than if they had
been drouths or hurricanes. It only remained to endure them as
necessary evils, and when they had passed over to build up again the
shattered structure of industry, as dwellers in an earthquake country
keep on rebuilding their cities on the same site.

"So far as considering the causes of the trouble inherent in their
industrial s