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 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 than at times of somewhat greater security, a very large proportion was
never employed at all, because the hazard of business was always very great in
the best of times.
    It should be also noted that the great amount of capital always seeking
employment where tolerable safety could be insured