Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/452

426 while a severe business depression was felt in England. Surely, although this is a great country, our Congress and Administration, and the Republican party, can not have been at the bottom of all that; and yet the effects produced by the crisis in Europe were in almost every respect the same as here. Speculations collapsed, values shrank violently, real estate went down; banks, manufacturing and trading firms failed in large numbers, extensive branches of industries stopped, laboring men were thrown out of employment or compelled to work for lower wages and grievous distress spread over all those countries as well as our own, and upon candid examination you will find that as the effects were similar in the two hemispheres so were the underlying causes.

In none of those countries was it a currency contraction that brought about the disaster, just as little as in our own. There was rather an expansion of it, especially in Germany. No, the real causes were as I have more than once had occasion to describe them: great wars resulting in an immense destruction and waste of wealth; large industries ministering to the work of destruction, instead of producing additional wealth; but after that, excessive enterprise, stimulated by apparent success; the sinking of large amounts of capital in great undertakings which could yield no immediate return, such as the building of railroads where they were not needed, far anticipating the future; the invention and introduction of new labor-saving machinery, creating new facilities of production and inciting excessive manufacturing beyond present demand; wild speculation, dealing and gambling in all sorts of imaginary values; an immense number of people frantically striving to make money quickly, by any means except solid work; an infatuated faith in the certain success of windy schemes; an unnatural straining of the credit system, by pushing speculation and enterprise far beyond