s, could find no work.
The sorry plight of these people may be imagined.

Again, one industry furnishes its raw material to another; one depends
upon the other; it follows that all must suffer and pay for the blows
that fall upon any. The circle of participants and sufferers spreads
ever wider. A number of obligations, assumed in the hope of a long
continuance of prosperity, cannot be met, and thus new fuel is added to
the conflagration of the crisis, whose flames rise higher from month to
month. An enormous mass of stored-up goods, tools, machinery, becomes
almost worthless. The goods are got rid of at great sacrifices. Not only
their proprietor is thereby ruined, but also dozens of others who are
thereby likewise forced to give up their goods under cost. During the
crisis itself, the method of production is all along improved with the
view of meeting future competition; but this only prepares the ground
for new and still worse crises. After the crisis has lasted years, after
the surplusage of goods has been gradually done away with through sales
at ruinous prices, through retrenchment of production, and through the
destruction of smaller concerns, society slowly begins to recover again.
Demand rises, and production follows suit--slowly at first and cautious,
but, with the continuance of prosperity, the old vertigo sets in anew.
Everyone is anxious to recover what he lost, and expects to be under
cover before the next crisis breaks in. Nevertheless, seeing that all
capitalists foster the identical thought, and that each one improves his
plant so as to head off the others, the catastrophe is soon brought on
again and with all the more fatal effect. Innumerable establishments
rise and fall like balls at a game, and out of such continuous ups and
downs flows the wretched state of things that is witnessed at all
crises. These crises crowd upon one another in the measure that large
production increases, and the competitive struggle--not between
individuals only, but between whole nations--becomes sharper. The
scampering for customers, on a small scale, and for markets on a large
one, gains in fierceness, and ends finally in great losses. Goods and
implements are heaped mountain high, yet the masses of the people suffer
hunger and want.

The autumn of the year 1890 brought new proof of the correctness of
this outline. After a long series of years of business depression,
during which, however, large capitalist development wa