Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/514

498 of gold is really equivalent to an increase in the available quantity of it. Furthermore, the methods of payment by balances between one market and another have become more varied and abundant. The simple development of international credit permits us to transfer funds from one country to another without a grain of gold being moved. Bank-notes circulate among all classes of the population in all countries, and checks have become everywhere a more usual means of payment. Piled up in the great banking-houses, the precious metals suffer less diminution by wearing, by material loss, and by hoarding. The whole world is thus managing to make less and less actual use of metallic money. To all the causes of decline we have passed in review may be added another cause, accidental and temporary, but effective while it continues in operation—the check to speculation. Speculation is as necessary to commerce as Achilles was to the army of the Greeks. It is that which gives life to trade, sustains prices, and fills the heart with hope. Without it everything languishes.

The reader may now be ready to infer from this review that an excess of production is the cause of the crisis. We are producing too much, and mankind is poor because of its wealth. Men are troubled to get enough to eat, to dress themselves, and to find lodging, because we are producing too much food, making too many clothes, and building too many houses! It can hardly escape any one that this explanation, when presented in this straightforward way, has a queer look. Have we really produced too much? Can we produce too much? At any rate, can it ever happen that an excess of production will engender misery? Such an hypothesis, at least in respect to the production of articles of subsistence, can hardly be admitted. Humanity has so many wants, natural or artificial, that it will never be satisfied, and we shall always have work to do for it. The old needs are extensible, and new ones are arising every day. When the man is warmly clad and he can not put on more clothes without loading himself down, he thinks about putting carpets on his floors and pictures on his walls. Consumption has unlimited appetites. It may, however, be admitted that there can be over-production of particular articles. Some humorous fellow, for instance, has suggested that we might make too many coffins, and, be they ever so cheap, the demand for them would not increase. But even in this case, perhaps, the taste would be stimulated for finer and more expensive coffins, and manufacturers would still have something to do. So there are a few other articles of which the number or quantity capable of being made useful is limited, but the quality of which is capable of indefinite expansion. In articles of personal use, like shoes and clothing, more abundant production and cheapening are apt to have the effect of causing us to change them often and to be more careless about having them repaired, and thus open the way to a larger demand for them. There are also articles not essential, but serving as instruments of