he suspended workers are
at once found occupation in some other department of the vast workshop
and lose only the time spent in changing, while, as for the glut, the
business of the nation is large enough to carry any amount of product
manufactured in excess of demand till the latter overtakes it. In such
a case of over-production, as I have supposed, there is not with us,
as with you, any complex machinery to get out of order and magnify a
thousand times the original mistake. Of course, having not even money,
we still less have credit. All estimates deal directly with the real
things, the flour, iron, wood, wool, and labor, of which money and
credit were for you the very misleading representatives. In our
calculations of cost there can be no mistakes. Out of the annual
product the amount necessary for the support of the people is taken,
and the requisite labor to produce the next year's consumption
provided for. The residue of the material and labor represents what
can be safely expended in improvements. If the crops are bad, the
surplus for that year is less than usual, that is all. Except for
slight occasional effects of such natural causes, there are no
fluctuations of business; the material prosperity of the nation flows
on uninterruptedly from generation to generation, like an ever
broadening and deepening river.

"Your business crises, Mr. West," continued the doctor, "like either
of the great wastes I mentioned before, were enough, alone, to have
kept your noses to the grindstone forever; but I have still to speak
of one other great cause of your poverty, and that was the idleness of
a great part of your capital and labor. With us it is the business of
the administration to keep in constant employment every ounce of
available capital and labor in the country. In your day there was no
general control of either capital or labor, and a large part of both
failed to find employment. 'Capital,' you used to say, 'is naturally
timid,' and it would certainly have been reckless if it had not been
timid in an epoch when there was a large preponderance of probability
that any particular business venture would end in failure. There was
no time when, if security could have been guaranteed it, the amount of
capital devoted to productive industry could not have been greatly
increased. The proportion of it so employed underwent constant
extraordinary fluctuations, according to the greater or less feeling
of uncertainty as to th