ABSTRACT
The features of the international trade crisis are to be seen in miniature not only in disturbances of national extent, but in the lesser fluctuations which are always occurring in domestic industry and commerce. Every Irish famine, the cholera epidemics in the middle of the century, the harvest failures, the railway mania and other excesses of speculation, every collapse of a banking or trading house, sent currents of injury vibrating through the whole social fabric; while, from the benefits of every great discovery and invention, every labour-saving device or improvement of method, some deduction must be made on account of the disturbance it created, in the absence of aids to economic readjustment. A maximum of friction, a miminum of security: these were the actual characteristics of a machine constructed by the spirit of gain out of the broken pieces of an organic society. The perfect fluidity of the factors of production and exchange, the “harmonies” expounded by Bastiat, are a myth of the old economics. Directly we pass from the study to the world of affairs, we perceive that the injury involved in this perpetual round of accident, displacement, and speculation is so widespread as to appear as a social disease rather than a series of individual injustices.
