ose interest it was to starve it. I assure you that the wonder
with us is, not that the world did not get rich under such a system,
but that it did not perish outright from want. This wonder increases as
we go on to consider some of the other prodigious wastes that
characterized it.

"Apart from the waste of labor and capital by misdirected industry, and
that from the constant bloodletting of your industrial warfare, your
system was liable to periodical convulsions, overwhelming alike the
wise and unwise, the successful cut-throat as well as his victim. I
refer to the business crises at intervals of five to ten years, which
wrecked the industries of the nation, prostrating all weak enterprises
and crippling the strongest, and were followed by long periods, often
of many years, of so-called dull times, during which the capitalists
slowly regathered their dissipated strength while the laboring classes
starved and rioted. Then would ensue another brief season of
prosperity, followed in turn by another crisis and the ensuing years of
exhaustion. As commerce developed, making the nations mutually
dependent, these crises became world-wide, while the obstinacy of the
ensuing state of collapse increased with the area affected by the
convulsions, and the consequent lack of rallying centres. In proportion
as the industries of the world multiplied and became complex, and the
volume of capital involved was increased, these business cataclysms
became more frequent, till, in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, there were two years of bad times to one of good, and the
system of industry, never before so extended or so imposing, seemed in
danger of collapsing by its own weight. After endless discussions, your
economists appear by that time to have settled down to the despairing
conclusion that there was no more possibility of preventing or
controlling these crises than if they had been drouths or hurricanes.
It only remained to endure them as necessary evils, and when they had
passed over to build up again the shattered structure of industry, as
dwellers in an earthquake country keep on rebuilding their cities on
the same site.

"So far as considering the causes of the trouble inherent in their
industrial system, your contemporaries were certainly correct. They
were in its very basis, and must needs become more and more maleficent
as the business fabric grew in size and complexity. One of these causes
was the lack of any commo