ABSTRACT
Our science is past its childhood, but has not reached its manhood yet. The problem of the business cycle is a case in point. It presented itself to the economists of the classic period and their immediate successors in the aspect of the striking fact of recurring 'crises'. By 'theory of the business cycle', first, an analysis of any single one of the cycles which history records, or, arising out of such analysis of recorded cycles, a reasoned history of the phenomenon. Industrial and commercial methods are never perfect in any sense except relatively to the average light and energy of the business community. The periods of depression, being typically the periods in which the changes in the productive organism, especially those embodied in new industrial plants which now have got into working order, the theoretical turning-point, begin to make themselves felt and to exert their pressure on the rest of the community, are consequently periods of deflation.
