Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/11

Rh that led eventually to the demonetization of silver, the Great War of 1914–18 with its consequential economic dislocations spreading all over the world, and the social disturbances and changes which confront us now. It is important not to confuse ordinary business cycles with the irregular undulations following some great upheaval of such nature.

The Great War of 1914–18 produced an economic cataclysm that enmeshed almost every human being in the civilized world. There will be no dissent from the statement that the world has not yet passed out of its shadow. It seems to me to be highly dangerous to convey any impression that the United States in 1921 simply passed through the depression of an ordinary business cycle.

The war of 1914–18 was not only immensely destructive of wealth and life, of systems of finance and of economic equilibria, but also it produced a new state of mind in all the people of the world, which finds expressions in the unwillingness to work and the thought that living may be enjoyed without it, owing to the experience of something that looked like that during the war. And along with this there was an extensive destruction of the principle of authority, which the masses of people had previously accepted for their guidance.

I wish that I had felt inspired to elaborate my chapter on the eight-hour and twelve-hour day. There is a great deal of documentary evidence from all of the principal countries of continental Europe that might have been cited and quoted more extensively. Whoever cares to dig more fully into this subject may easily do so. It is mainly of the same order, however, and to the same general effect and repetition of it would be wearisome. In the great post-war evil of shortening the hours of work I find the explanation of much of the failure of economic revival abroad and there is much reason to surmise that America is suffering from the same trouble, though of course much less acutely than Europe. This subject is associated in the closest ways with those