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Show THE BUSINESS 0UTL001L The London Statist discusses the gold production and the trade output. It points out how ruin, has come, after a long series of extremely prosperous years, in almost every country. "With a great rise in prices and rampant speculation in many directions, direc-tions, overtrading takes place, then comes a shrinkage. shrink-age. Great amounts of wealth were destroyed in the - South African war and the Russian-Japanese war, leading to great demands to replenish the void. This writer declares .that wars do not influence influ-ence trade as much as might be expected, and cites the fact that in 1873 the panic that came affected Austria, Great Britaii and the United States, countries coun-tries that had nothing to do with the Franco-Prussian war. The writer seems to ignore the real cause of the panic in 1873, at least in our country. In our War of the Rebellion immense amounts of paper money were necessarily issued. It was at a discount as compared with gold and silver. Instead of fixing the matter so that a reasonable amount of this paper should be called in annually, our Congress " retired in a lump a vast amount. At the same time it demonetized silver, with the natural result that the money in the . country . was reduced 50 f- per cent, and there was nothing possible to follow except the reduction of prices 50 per cent, and as most men were in debt that reduction in the money volume left them stranded. At the same time our country owed in interest-bearing bonds more than two thousand millions of dollars. The States and cities and railroad corporations owed probably twice as much more, so that the interest account that had to be paid was something frightful. s In the meantime Congress fixed it so that that n interest and principal had to be paid in gold. Never " before in history was a nation so robbed and so - wronged by a Government as was ours. How the people stood it without a rebellion can only be accounted ac-counted for on the score that ours are. as a rule, the most law-abiding people and long-suffering people that the world ever saw. The writer in the Statist considers the present situation and whether or not the signs now indicate a repetition of what happened in 1873, and decides that they do not. He thinks there will be a slowing slow-ing down of business among all the civilized nations, but he cannot see in that slowing down any promise of a panic. So far.as our own cpuntry is concerned, we should say that there may be periods of slight depression, de-pression, but nothing like a general panic could be expected so long as the trade of our country brings to us four or five hundred millions of dollars from abroad, and our mines supply between two and three hundred millions of dollars of new money annually. an-nually. There may be failures of crops; there might ppme a j-ear when the cotton and the wheat crops ; would both fail in our country, although that can hardly be expected because' the cotton extends from the Atlantic coast to western Texas, and the wheat crop extends from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, and while there may be periods when both of these crops will fail in some places, it is hardly to be expected ex-pected that it can be general. But were it general, it would simply be a notice to business men to slow down. How far speculation can affect a country re-, re-, mains to be seen. We do not see any danger in railroad rail-road speculation so long as the main roads have more than they can do and are able to pay interest on their .holdings. Neither is the speculation in mines, so long as every year t,he mines are making a better and better showing. : If some substitute should be devised that would take the place of copper wire that would affect the copper stocks, but that could not make a universal panic, and there is no probability that any such substitute sub-stitute will be discovered. To us it looks as though the trade of the country was on a basis of splendor that has never, been approached ap-proached by any other country in its magnificence, and it does not seem as though there was any possible possi-ble cause through which that trade can be generally disturbed. .. |