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66 than the whole that he has now in store, though she be herself but a child on the mere margin of the infinite, and though the mathematics of her wisdom grow not in a converging, but in an ever diverging series, he must believe.

This, then, is the first of the six remedies in question. The second of them lies in quite a different direction. At present, if supply is not as efficient in creative power as it will be, industrial demand is also weak.

Demand, in the modern business world, tends to fluctuate rapidly in detail. The reason of this is that man's requirements are increasingly regulated not by his body but by his mind, not by his wants but by his imagination. The human stomach is speedily satisfied, the mind, never, being infinitely progressive and incalculably various in its desires. This constant shifting of requisition evidently breeds commercial instability.

But demand tends to fluctuate not only thus in detail, but, what is far more important, as a whole and bodily. Ever since the closing years of the eighteenth century, economists have noticed that our trade regularly oscillates in periodic cycles of good and bad times, these being usually reckoned at ten or eleven years. The tide of activity, then, pulses by a general ebb and flow, which dominates the whole economic life of the nation, and enables the history of its collective business to be mapped out into eras of progress and stagnation. It has been further ascertained recently that corresponding