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Show The best we can hope from them right now is that they will not make economic eco-nomic recovery more difficult by bankrupting the treasury through projects involving the indirect purchase pur-chase of votes. HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. "A cycle of delusive and bubble prosperity was followed by actual widespread calamity. It was a period per-iod of gloom and, agony no price for property or produce no sales but those of the sheriff and marshal no purchaser at executive sales but creditors or some hoarder of money no employment for industry no demand de-mand for labor no sale for the products pro-ducts of the farm. no sound of the hammer but that of the auctioneer. Distress, the universal of the people: relief, the universal demand thundering thunder-ing at the doors of all legislatures, state and federal." This is not, as it might seem, an extract from a recent speech on the economic conditions of 1931. It is an account by ' Thomas H. Benton of conditions existing in the United States when he entered the Senate from Missouri in 1819-20. In his work, "Thirty Years Review," Senator Benton thus quotes from a speech by a colleague in the Senate in 1833, referring to economic conditions con-ditions at that time: "A whole nation in the midst of unparalleled prosperity and Acadian felicity has been suddenly struck into poverty and plunged into unutterable woe." Woodrow Wilson, in his "History of the American People," thus describes des-cribes the conditions prevailing in 1840: "The" country went staggering through its season of bitter ruin. There had been nothing like it in the history of America. Utter collapse and despair came, soon or late, upon every sort of undertaking the year through." In the same work Woodrow Wilson writes: "Widespread financial distress filled fill-ed all the year 1857 with deep disquietude, dis-quietude, now sharp and now touched with panic; now slow, dull lethargy, in which merchants and manufacturers manufac-turers and transportation companies and banks merely waited and did not hope." Thus are described four industrial panics within 40 years prior to the Civil War, each of them more general and disastrous than the present depression, de-pression, which, severe as it is, has reduced the level of business and employment em-ployment 20 per cent below the high water mark of 1929. Those who attribute the present depression to the effects of mass production with resultant over-production, may with profit contemplate the fact that these greater and more frequent fre-quent depressions of the ante-bellum period came while this country had progressed little beyond the handicraft handi-craft stage in industry. A variety of causes entered into each of these depressions, but it is recorded that in each case depression followed an era of speculation and inflation. in-flation. The year of the stock market panic which has been followed by the present industrial depression, was marked by the greatest inflation of private credit this country has ever witnessed. The fact that America recovered from all of these earlier depressions and passed on into a degree of prosperity pros-perity and high standards of living for the masses undreamed of by our great-grandfathers ought to furnish some consolation even to those pessimists pes-simists who are never so happy as when they are wallowing in gloom. We are often told that these recurring recur-ring depressions prove that there is something wrong with our economic system. There is, of course, something wrong with every man-made system, as there is with those who creat it. The only perfect system is one that has never been tried. Once on trial it becomes subject to the limitations and weaknesses of human nature, and it no more works "perfectly" than does the human body or the automobile automo-bile when abused. The task of keeping keep-ing in perfect adjustment a vast system sys-tem of production, distribution and consumption covering so vast and varied a nation as ours is not quite so easy as it looks to those who believe be-lieve that ability to diagnose a disease dis-ease proves the capacity to cure it; The remedy most often proposed is to surrender all property and liberty I to the politicians. One must admire the child-like faith in the wisdom and virtue of politicians this indicate.1;. What experience it is based on is not at this time visible to the naked eye. |