made to understand that in modern society they owe a duty to the whole people that transcends their personal privileges. There is a broader and higher plane than the contest between capital and labor, upon which the social question must be discussed, and as ignorance disappears before the spirit of inquiry, all the contestants will take their places upon it. Then the question to be decided will not be the adjustment of strikes and lock-outs, but the definition of the rights to property and the right to use the earth.

CHAPTER XIV.

ENCHANTED WEALTH.

To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuler, in any way better? Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for him, like a true servant, not like a false mock servant; to do him any real service whatsoever? As yet no one. We have more riches than any nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any nation ever had before. Our successful industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success if we stop here! In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Have we actually got enchanted then; accursed by some god?-THOMAS CARLYLE.

IN western Yankee land "hard times' is a unique phrase applied to the industrial depressions which have afflicted modern civilization in all parts of the world at comparatively brief intervals in the last one hundred years, especially since the forces of productive machinery and rapid transportation have been called to the assistance of human effort. In recent years a wordy warfare has been waged among the politicians and political economists of every country concerning the causes of such depressions, and almost every kind of political action bearing in any way upon the revenues or financial policy of the nations afflicted with hard times is attacked by

one faction or another as the principal if not the only cause of the disagreeable phenomena. In the United States, free traders and low-tariff advocates denounce protection; protectionists blame free-trade propositions and tariff reductions; gold-standard advocates denounce former silver laws; free-silver partisans denounce a supposed monopoly of gold; and believers in abundant paper money denounce all the other classes and their methods of relieving hard times.

One theory is too much production; another, too little consumption; a third, too much speculation; and a fourth, not enough money. One political party proposes to cure the evil with high tariff; another with low tariff; a third by issuing paper money; and a fourth by destroying liquor. The disciples of Henry George view these disputants from afar, insisting that they are all wrong, and declaring that the private ownership of land is the real cause of industrial depression. These are samples of a thousand different views held with more or less tenacity and faith by the people of the United States, and it is likely that a similar diversity of opinion exists in every other country afflicted by the same evils. In searching for a cause, nearly all merely casual thinkers neglect two prominent features connected with these disastrous periods. One is, that usually the whole civilized world is similarly affected at any given period, although the extreme depression of the wave may not reach any two distant points at exactly the same time; the other is, that since the great arteries of commerce formed by steamship and railway lines connect the nations constituting our modern civilization, those countries are really bound into one vast industrial nation, in which the people differ in government, language, religion, habits, and customs to some extent, but wherein identically the same industrial processes exist, with almost as thorough a system of exchange between

the people as there would be if no boundary lines existed and all were amalgamated under a single government. Remembering that hard times are an industrial depression, and not a political or a religious depression, we need also to bear in mind that the whole civilized world is really bound together by its system of production and exchange into one great industrial nation, and that the industrial depression afflicts all parts of that great composite nation at approximately the same time.

It is, of course, impossible in a structure so complex as modern society that only a single cause shall produce every one of the myriad effects to be noted in the different localities where industrial depressions exist, but as these great waves of alternate prosperity and adversity sweep at somewhat regular intervals over the entire civilized world, their essential features being the same in all parts of it, the theory seems reasonable that a general cause must exist for a phenomenon almost universally the same in its effects over so wide an area at practically the same time, instead of a multitude of lesser causes.

The real nature of hard times must be studied before seeking for the cause. Many disastrous famines have afflicted various portions of the world, and their terrible history is still recorded occasionally, although modern civilization has lessened their severity. These famines have been characterized by some of the phenomena attending the industrial depressions, but there is no parallel of conditions. When the famine occurs, food is lacking from the failure of crops, and all that men eat and wear becomes scarce, with high prices for all that is to be consumed. Poor people dependent immediately upon the products of the soil they cultivate, sometimes suffer to the extent of starvation. It is the grim specter of want driving human beings to the last extremities in fields that have refused to yield enough to sustain life.

Our industrial depressions are like the famines in the existence of suffering among the poor, but with that similarity the likeness ceases. Amidst what people term hard times, neither food nor clothing is scarce. Everything that man needs to eat or to wear is profusely abundant and exceedingly cheap. The farmer's crops do not usually fail, but he is unable to sell them except at prices that scarcely leave him a profit or sometimes involve a loss. Manufacturers complain that they cannot sell their products, and close their factories. Idle men abound, and employment is scarce. Business is stagnated, commercial transactions become unprofitable, and frequent insolvency results. Lack of profitable employment compels the thrifty laboring classes to withdraw their savings rapidly from the banks, and the weakest banks suspend payments. Panics usually succeed these suspensions, and the confidence of the people in the solvency of banking institutions is destroyed. Runs upon the savings banks occur; the banks are compelled by the pressure to call in all their available funds to meet the demands of depositors, and are obliged to refuse to make new loans even on the best of security, although their vaults may be bursting with coin, for fear that their timorous depositors may bring to bear too great a pressure. In the business world, nothing seems capable of yielding a profit; men cannot obtain money to pay their debts, and they say that it is scarce; investments cease to be made in new undertakings, property of all kinds depreciates in value, and life, to the faithful subjects of Mammon who inhabit this planet, appears to be literally not worth living. The unemployed swarm over the country seeking an honest means of earning a livelihood by labor at first, and gradually degenerating into thieves or beggars, according to their mental and moral characteristics, when their necessities become more and more

stringent. In the winter these outcasts from modern civilization seeking shelter from the storms and cold, congregate in the large cities, where they develop into Coxey armies to afflict a wondering, puzzled people with a troubled apprehension of their unpleasant existence, and compel them to develop something like an attempt to remove the worst features of the evil condition. The salient features of an industrial depression in agricultural pursuits are described vividly in the subjoined extract from a letter sent by a young man in the State of Washington to his brother in Connecticut during the recent general prostration :

"DEAR BROTHER :-Times are dull here, and everybody who has work at all is working for small pay. But living is cheap, that is one thing. People are not complaining for cheap eatables. Things are too cheap. Just think of wheat selling for 15 cents a bushel-60 pounds. People are so hard up for cash that they have to sell their wheat for any price. There are ranches down in the Pullos country with from 150 to 200 acres of wheat standing in the field; can't get money enough for it to pay for cutting and threshing it; 15 cents won't do it, and the farmers, some of them, have let it go to waste. They haul potatoes to town by the load and can't get 30 cents a hundredweight; and as for houses, you can get one to live in for nothing; there are any amount of them empty. Out on the car lines you can get houses to live in free of rent, so that the owner can keep up the insurance; you can't keep up insurance on empty houses, and sooner than have their houses vacant, they will let you live in them rent free. A trade don't do a person much good here now, and if you are out of work, you have to cast your trade aside and work at anything you can get to do. Great changes have taken place here within the last few years. Men who have been worth money are now without a dollar and working on the railroad for a living. I used to know a preacher, when times were good, who had a good church in the country; he is a roustabout in a grocery store now. Carpenters, plumbers, and mechanics