ystem, your contemporaries were certainly correct. They
were in its very basis, and must needs become more and more maleficent
as the business fabric grew in size and complexity. One of these
causes was the lack of any common control of the different industries,
and the consequent impossibility of their orderly and coordinate
development. It inevitably resulted from this lack that they were
continually getting out of step with one another and out of relation
with the demand.

"Of the latter there was no criterion such as organized distribution
gives us, and the first notice that it had been exceeded in any group
of industries was a crash of prices, bankruptcy of producers, stoppage
of production, reduction of wages, or discharge of workmen. This
process was constantly going on in many industries, even in what were
called good times, but a crisis took place only when the industries
affected were extensive. The markets then were glutted with goods, of
which nobody wanted beyond a sufficiency at any price. The wages and
profits of those making the glutted classes of goods being reduced or
wholly stopped, their purchasing power as consumers of other classes
of goods, of which there was no natural glut, was taken away, and, as
a consequence, goods of which there was no natural glut became
artificially glutted, till their prices also were broken down, and
their makers thrown out of work and deprived of income. The crisis was
by this time fairly under way, and nothing could check it till a
nation's ransom had been wasted.

"A cause, also inherent in your system, which often produced and
always terribly aggravated crises, was the machinery of money and
credit. Money was essential when production was in many private hands,
and buying and selling was necessary to secure what one wanted. It
was, however, open to the obvious objection of substituting for food,
clothing, and other things a merely conventional representative of
them. The confusion of mind which this favored, between goods and
their representative, led the way to the credit system and its
prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to accept money for
commodities, the people next accepted promises for money, and ceased
to look at all behind the representative for the thing represented.
Money was a sign of real commodities, but credit was but the sign of a
sign. There was a natural limit to gold and silver, that is, money
proper, but none to credit, and the result was t