Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/159

Rh are always made the basis of engagements and contracts. When the enterprises fail, the engagements cannot be met; other engagements based on these also fail, and so on through the whole industrial organization. Such crises are inevitable in a new country. Enterprises run in fashions. At any one time great groups of producers tend to one line of industry. That industry is sure to be overdone and to come to a crisis. In a free country, where every man is at liberty to direct his enterprise as he sees fit, what is the sense, when it turns out that he has made a mistake, of trying to throw the losses on other people? No one would propose it as to an individual or a number, but when there is a great interest it makes itself a political power and produces a platform for the same purpose, generally with inflated principles of humanity, justice, democracy, and Americanism as wind-attachments to make it float.

Mr. St. John says that the farmers are spending ten dollars an acre to get eight or nine dollars an acre. What farmer in the United States can tell how many dollars he spends on an acre? What is the sense of these pretendedly accurate figures? But, if they had sense, what would be the gain of cutting the dollars in two? If the farmer spent twenty silver dollars on an acre and got back sixteen or eighteen, how would he be benefited? The dollars of outlay are of the same kind as the dollars of return in any case. If it is true that the return does not equal the outlay, it must be on account of some facts of production, and it requires but a moment's reflection to see that changing the currency in which outlay and income are reckoned cannot change the relation between the two.

A dispassionate view of facts will go to prove that the world is reasonably and ordinarily prosperous at the present time, except where particular classes and industries are affected by special circumstances, as some classes and industries are being affected at all times. The land-owners