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 calculation 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 the stability of the industrial situation, so that the output of
the national industries greatly varied in different years. But for the
same reason that the amount of capital employed at times of special
insecurity was far less