welfare. The process is a salutary if not a pleasant one--and has been
applied remorsely ever since Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked.

So it is with the volume of the world's business. However well men may
try to balance the trend of affairs so as to produce a normal relation
between the output and the needs of humanity, the natural laws do not
cease to operate in a rhythmic alternation between the high prices which
stimulate production and the glut of goods which overtakes the demand of
the market and breaks the price.

But this change in the sequence from boom to depression is not an
unmixed evil. Prosperity spells extravagance in production. While the
good times endure, there is no sufficient incentive either to economy or
to invention. A concern which is selling goods at a high profit as fast
as it can make them will not trouble to manage its affairs on strict
economic lines. It is when the pinch begins to be felt that men will
investigate with relentless zeal their whole method of production, will
welcome every procedure which reduces cost, and seek for every new
invention which promises an economy. Depression is the purge of
business. The lean years abolish the adipose deposit of prosperity. The
athlete is once more trained down fine for the battle.

Men who realise these facts will not, therefore, grumble overmuch at bad
times. They will, at least, have had the sense to see that those times
were bound to come, and have refused to believe that they had entered
into a perpetual paradise of high prices. In this respect free will
makes the individual superior to the alternations of the market. He, at
least, is not compelled to be always either exalted or depressed. If he
cannot be the master of the market, he is, at least, master of his own
fate.

How, then, should men deal with the alternate cycles of flourishing and
declining trade? There is a celebrated dictum, "Sell on arising market,
buy on a falling one."

That man will be safest who will reject this time-worn theory, or will
only accept it with profound modifications. The advice I tender on this
subject is as applicable to Throgmorton Street as it is good for Mincing
Lane. The danger of the dictum is that it commits the believer to rowing
for ever against the tide.

Let us take the case of buying on a falling market. That a man should
abstain from all buying transactions while the market is falling is an
absurd proposition. But it is none the less true in