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f speculative purpose might have been equally disastrous. It could hardly have been so rapid, because it could not have been so directly distributed among the masses of the people. Yet the machinery of credit is such that any considerable failure in enterprise or speculation is felt everywhere. The banks are at once called upon for larger loans and for deposits together, an impossibility in the nature of the case. All exchangeable forms of credit are immediately offered in market at constantly decreasing prices. Current credit of every kind is checked, and exchange is limited to the barest necessities. All productive energies are practically stopped, except such as are out of the line of daily exchanges. Very soon all domestic expenses are reduced to the lowest notch, domestic help is discharged, the well-to-do undertake to help themselves, and the poor are left without resources. It seems as if all the wheels of progress had stopped. _Hard times._--Succeeding such a crisis must follow hard times. Wage earners generally are without employment; manufactories have put out their fires; the warehouses full of goods are under attachment; farm produce is moved very slowly to market; fancy stock of horses, cattle and sheep are unsalable; farm mortgages are foreclosed as rapidly as the laws allow; skilled workmen meet absolute necessities by half time, and common laborers move from place to place in useless search for employment, their families being barely kept alive by charity. The fact that warehouses and granaries are full leads to the assumption that over-production has destroyed the market and the demand for labor. This is quite probably true of all articles of such a nature as to be held for speculative purposes. The staple grains and fancy live stock are illustrations of these. An universal over-production, so long as the articles produced are adapted to current wants, is impossible, since every man's product, if needed, is his means of securing another man's product to meet his own wants. On the other hand, the suffering of multitudes and the abstinence of everybody lead to the supposition that under-consumption, or failure to use what we might, is a principal cause. It is undoubtedly true that fear of absolute want checks consumption of articles within our reach. This is shown by the immediate increase of consumption as soon as the fear subsides. This, however, is a symptom of the times, rather than a cause. Some
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