Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/212

 190 all according to rule. Just as prosperity in one field leads to prosperity in others when things are improving, so there is sympathetic action and reaction in an opposite direction when the tide has turned. According to past experience, it will take many months to complete the liquidation which has begun.

The volume of business, it should be understood, is often not so very much less in a time of depression than it is in the time of prosperity just preceding. As far as things have yet gone the reduction of the volume of business is represented by an increase of the unemployed margin from about 1½ per cent. a year ago to 2½ per cent. at the present time. The addition of another one or two per cent. to this margin of unemployed will be sufficient to mark an immense difference in the feeling about trade. It is the smallness of this margin between prosperity and adversity which helps to make the study of economic conditions in the concrete very difficult for the student. The statistics are far from easy.

Two questions have come into great prominence as the result of the liquidation. One is the immediate prospect of the silver market. The bad times have undoubtedly helped to mar the calculations upon which speculators based their hopes of a sustained rise in the price of silver as the result of the additional purchases ordered by the American Silver Act of last year. If the consumption of silver in all directions had continued at the high level of 1889 and 1890 before the speculation began, then the American purchases might have told more on the silver market for the moment than in fact they have done. But the consumption of silver, as of other things, cannot he expected to be the same in bad times as in good, and the demand for India, as for other quarters, is not what it was a year ago. The rise in price has itself probably helped to check the demand, but it may be doubted whether, in any case, the demand of 1891, following a year of crisis, would have been so great as the demand in the 'booming' years preceding the crisis, The fact that there is a large speculative account open in silver and in rupee paper is accordingly one of the dangerous elements in the financial position at the present moment. The speculation for the time has gone wrong, and it remains to be seen whether the American purchases will be large enough to pull things round by the time that the ordinary consumption of silver again increases. The danger, moreover, is all the greater because it is, of course, quite uncertain how long the United States law, directing purchases on the present scale, can he maintained, and how far, if maintained, it can prevent the paper issued against the silver from itself falling to a discount.

The other question is the extent of the resources of the Argentine Republic. Nothing has been more remarkable in the recent discussions in the City on the Argentine collapse than the infrequency of discussions in detail respecting the wealth of the country. The Argentine Republic is usually spoken of as having unbounded but undeveloped resources. It may be doubted, however, whether it has not been