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