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 common control of
the different industries, and the consequent impossibility of their orderly and
coördinate development. It inevitably resulted from this lack that they were
continually getting out of step with one another and out of relation with the
demand.
    Of the latter there was no criterion such as organized distribution gives
us, and the first notice that it had been exceeded in any group of industries
was a crash of prices, bankruptcy of producers, stoppage of production,
reduction of wages, or discharge of workmen. This process was constantly going
on in many industries, even in what were called good times, but a crisis took
place only when the industries affected were extensive. The markets then were
glutted with goods, of which nobody wanted beyond a sufficiency at any price.
The wages and profits of those making the glutted classes of goods being reduced
or wholly stopped, their purchasing power as consumers of other classes of
goods, of which there was no natural glut, was taken away, and, as a
consequence, goods of which there was no natural glut became artificially
glutted, till their prices also were broken down, and their makers thrown out of
work and deprived of income. The crisis was by this time fairly under way, and
nothing could check it till a nation's ransom had been wasted.
    A cause, also inherent in your system, which often produced and always
terribly aggravated crises, was the machinery of money and credit. Money was
essential when production was in many private hands, and buying and selling was
necessary to secure what one wanted. It was, however, open to the obvious
objection of substituting for food, clothing, and other things a merely
conventional representative of them. The confusion of mind which this favored,
between goods and their representative, led the way to the credit system and its
prodigious illusions. Already accustomed to accept money for commodities, the
people next accepted promises for money, and ceased to look at all behind the
representative for the thing represented. Money was a sign of real commodities,
but credit was but the sign of a sign. There was a natural limit to gold and
silver, that is, money proper, but none to credit, and the result was that the
volume of credit, that is, the promises of money, ceased to bear any
ascertainable proportion