78 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



visited with the most violent assaults, and which 

 has met them with the greatest of economical 

 virtues. Her losses and sufferings have surpassed 

 those endured by any other nation, yet the deep, 

 heavy pressure of the commercial paralysis has 

 weighed upon her the least oppressively of all. 

 War has desolated her broad fields and over- 

 thrown her industries over great areas of her 

 territory. Her taxation has been suddenly raised 

 by the gigantic sum of thirty millions of English 

 pounds a year — a burden ever recurring, ever 

 oppressing her resources and devouring the fruits 

 of her painful and persevering toil. Her share 

 of the commercial trial has been the severest and 

 largest of all; yet at this hour she exhibits, not 

 the melancholy languor of business-men in other 

 countries, but the active movements of quickened 

 recovery, heavily clogged though they be by the 

 failure of the silkworm and the beet-root. She 

 will point for us presently an economical moral 

 of the very highest value. Her recent commer- 

 cial history repels the objection that the wave of 

 financial suffering broke with less violence on her 

 shore : the facts of her commercial situation were 

 only too plain and too cruel. But they will en- 

 able her to teach to all nations the priceless les- 

 son how to contend against and to overcome the 

 calamities which reckless folly or moral visita- 

 tions inflict on populations. The greatness of 

 her disasters, and the vigor and even joyousness 

 of her recovery, will furnish instruction incom- 

 parably more vivid and more easily gathered than 

 the technical phrases of economical writers. In 

 one of its most important departments France 

 may be justly called the heroine of Political Econ- 

 omy. 



The range of the depression receives a re- 

 markable illustration from the report of Mr. Gif- 

 fen, the head of the Statistical Department of the 

 Board of Trade, on emigration in the year 1876. 

 In no preceding year have fewer emigrants from 

 England, or so many immigrants into England, 

 been registered. The balance of emigration from 

 the United Kingdom was only 46,575 against 

 225,000 in 1872. To the United States the sur- 

 plus of emigrants reached only 3,473 — 12,060 

 having returned from that country back to the 

 United Kingdom. A similar decline is shown in 

 the emigration to Canada; while only 30,612 

 emigrated to Australia compared with 33,417. 

 The significance of these figures consists in the 

 large numbers who come back from the new 

 lands, as affording them no better prospects than 

 the old ones. Evidence abounds to show how 

 little and how unremunerative employment could 



be found in regions which were wont to open 

 their arms to the dense populations of Europe, 

 and to reward them with prospects of comfort 

 and prosperity. A situation radically changed 

 had come over the Old World. 



Such a depression, spread over so many coun- 

 tries, inflicting such continuous distress, and last- 

 ing for so long a period of time, the history of 

 trade has probably never before exhibited. It is 

 not the desolation of wide regions under the 

 ravages of savage invaders, nor the disappear- 

 ance of populations and of wealth under the 

 long-continued and destructive violence of a 

 Thirty Years' War. It is, with the exception of 

 the Franco-German War, a purely economical 

 phenomenon, the result of conduct whose nature 

 and consequences it is the office of Political 

 Economy to study and explain. The causes of 

 the suffering are forces which are ever at work 

 on the wealth of nations ; the warnings and the 

 remedy, if any, must be derived from the same 

 source. One feature of the situation, in this very 

 relation to economical action, comes forth with 

 transparent prominence. Its severity, its losses, 

 the injury it inflicts on the material welfare and 

 happiness of mankind, are incomparably sharper 

 and more disastrous than any ever inflicted by 

 any so-called crisis in the money-market of any 

 country. All the world knows what are the 

 agonies of a Black Friday in the city. The pict- 

 ure has been often painted with its black and 

 heart-rending colors. The terror of the banks, 

 the sickening fear of immediate ruin convulsing 

 the great firms, the wild alarm of a frightened 

 imagination converting the possibility of insolven- 

 cy into certainty, the impassioned cry for help 

 poured out upon the deaf ears of callous bankers 

 by companies gazing on the abyss yawning before 

 them, the agitation of wellnigh every trader in 

 the nation — then the stoppages, the bankruptcies, 

 the impoverishment of unexpecting multitudes — 

 have indelibly impressed themselves on the mem- 

 ory of every man of business. Struck by the 

 powers of such terrible events, the public press 

 for years afterward refers all uncomfortable 

 features of trade to the agency of the monetary 

 crisis. Its effects are traced down a long period 

 of subsequent time. Such agonies are actual 

 realities, and fearful indeed are the pangs they 

 create; nevertheless this description, so far as it 

 seeks to set forth the true nature of what is hap- 

 pening, is substantially untrue. A crisis, how- 

 ever intense, in the city, is the agony of a day of 

 settlement. Who is to lose ? is the thought which 

 fills every commercial mind with terror. Is the 



