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NATURE 



[Nov. 14, 1878 



adopted a theory of periodicity thirty or forty years ago. 

 In February, 1848, Mr. J. T. Danson read a paper to the 

 Statistical Society of London, attempting to trace a con- 

 nection between periodic changes in the condition of the 

 people and the variations occurring in the same period in 

 the prices of the most necessary articles of food. Mr. 

 James Wilson had published, in 1840, a separate work or 

 large pamphlet upon "Fluctuations of Currency, Com- 

 merce, and Manufactures," in which he speaks of the 

 frequent recurrence of periods of excitement and depres- 

 sion. In later years Mr. Wm. Langton, the esteemed 

 banker of Manchester, independently remarked the 

 existence of the decennial cycle, saying : " These disturb- 

 ances are the accompaniment of another ware, which 

 appears to have a decennial period, and in the generation 

 of which moral causes have no doubt an important 

 share." The paper in which this remark occurs. is con- 

 tained in the Transactiofis of the Manchester Statistical 

 Society for 1857, and is one of the most luminous 

 inquiries concerning commercial fluctuations anywhere to 

 be found.i In still later years Mr. John Mills of the 

 Manchester Statistical Society has almost made this 

 subject his own, insisting, however, mainly upon the 

 mental origin of what he has aptly called the Credit 

 Cycle. 



The peculiar interest of Dr. Hyde Clarke' s speculations 

 consists in the fact that he not only remarked the cycle 

 of ten or eleven years, but sought to explain it as due to 

 physical causes, although he had not succeeded in disco- 

 vering any similar astronomical or meteorological varia- 

 tion with which to connect it. Writing as he did in 1838 

 and 1847, this failure is not to be wondered at. His sup- 

 posed period of fifty-four years is perhaps deserving of 

 further investigation, but it is with his period of ten or 

 eleven years that we are now concerned. 



My own inquiries into this interesting subject naturally 

 fall much posterior to those of Dr. Clarke ; but, about the 

 year 1 862, I prepared two elaborate statistical diagrams, 

 one of which exhibited in a single sheet all the accounts 

 of the Bank of England since 1844, while the other em- 

 braced all the monthly statements I could procure of the 

 price of corn, state of the funds, rate of discount, and 

 number of bankruptcies in England from the year 1731 

 onwards. Subsequent study of these diagrams produced 

 upon my mind a deep conviction that the events of 181 5, 

 1825, 1836-39, 1847, and 1857, exhibited a true but mys- 

 terious periodicity. There was no appearance, indeed, 

 of like periodicity in the earlier parts of my second dia- 

 gram. In the first fifteen years of this century statistical 

 numbers were thrown into confusion by the great wars, the 

 suspension of specie payments, and the frequent extremely 

 high prices of corn. It must be allowed, moreover, that the 

 statistical diagram, so far as concerns the eighteenth 

 century, presents no appreciable trace of decennial 

 periodicity. The recent continual discussions concern- 

 ing the solar or sun-spot period much increased the 

 interest of this matter, and in 1875 I made a laborious 

 reduction of the data contained in Prof. Thorold Rogers' 

 admirable *' History of Agriculture and Prices in Eng- 

 land from the Year 1259." I then believed that I had 

 discovered the solar period in the prices of corn and 

 various agricultural commodities, and I accordingly read 

 a paper to that effect at the British Association at Bristol. 

 Subsequent inquiry, however, seemed to show that periods 

 of three, five, seven, nine, or even thirteen years would 

 agree with Prof. Rogers' data just as well as a period of 

 eleven years ; in disgust at this result I withdrew the 

 paper from further publication. I should like, however, 

 to be now allowed to quote the following passage from 

 the MS. of the paper in question ; — 



" Before concluding I will throw out a surmise, which, 

 though it is a mere surmise, seems worth making. It is 

 now pretty generally allowed that the fluctuations of the 



,' It is reprinted in the Transactions of the same Society for 1875-76. 



money market, though often apparently due to excep- 

 tional and accidental events, such as wars, great commer- 

 cial failures, unfounded panics, and so forth, yet do 

 exhibit a remarkable tendency to recur at intervals ap- 

 proximating to ten or eleven years. Thus the principal 

 commmercial crises have happened in the years 1825, 

 1836-9, 1847, 1857, 1866, and I was almost adding 1879, 

 so convinced do I feel that there will, within the next 

 few years, be another great crisis. Now if there should 

 be in or about the year 1 879, a great collapse comparable 

 with those of the years mentioned, there will have been 

 five such occurrences in fifty-four years, giving almost 

 exactly eleven years (iO'8) as the average interval, which 

 sufficiently approximates to iri, the supposed exact 

 length of the sun-spot period, to warrant speculations as 

 to their possible connection." 



I was led to assign the then coming (that is, the now 

 present) crisis to the year 1879, because in years added 

 twice over to 1857, the date of the last perfectly normal 

 crisis, or to 1847, the date of the previous one, brings 

 the calculator to 1879. If I could have employed 

 instead Mr. J. A. Broun' s since published estimate of the 

 sun-spot period, to be presently mentioned, namely, 

 io'45 years, I should have come exactly to the present 

 year 1878. My mistake of one year was due to the 

 meteorologists' mistake of eight months, which, as crises 

 usually happen in October and November, was sufficient 

 to throw the estimate of the event into the next twelve- 

 months. 



While writing my 1875 paper for the British Associa- 

 tion, I was much embarrassed by the fact that the com- 

 mercial fluctuations could with difficulty be reconciled 

 with a period of ii'i years. If, indeed, we start from 

 1825, and add ii"i years time after time, we get i836"i, 

 1847-2, i858"3, i869"4, i88o'S, which show a gradually 

 increasing discrepancy from 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866 (and 

 now 1878), the true dates of the crises. To explain this 

 discrepancy I went so far as to form the rather fanciful 

 hypothesis that the commercial world might be a body so 

 mentally constituted, as Mr. John Mills must hold, as to 

 be capable of vibrating in a period of ten years, so that 

 it would every now and then be thrown into oscillation 

 by physical causes having a period of eleven years. The 

 subsequent publication, however, of Mr. J. A. Broun' s 

 inquiries, tending to show that the solar period is io'45 

 years, not iri,^ placed the matter in a very different 

 light, and removed the difficulties. Thus, if we take Mr. 

 John Mills' " Synopsis of Commercial Panics in the Pre- 

 sent Century," and, rejecting 1866 as an instance of a 

 premature panic, count from 1815 to 1857, we find that 

 four credit cycles occupy forty-two years, giving an 

 average duration of io'5 years, which is a remarkably 

 close approximation to Mr. Broun' s solar period. Thus 

 encouraged, it at last occurred to me to look back into 

 the previous century, where facts of a strongly con- 

 firmatory character at once presented themselves. Not 

 only was there a great panic in 1793, as Dr. Hyde Clarke 

 remarked, but there were very distinct events of a similar 

 nature in the years 1783, 1772-3, and 1763. About these 

 dates there can be no question, for they may all be found 

 clearly stated on pp. 627 and 628 of the first volume of Mr. 

 Macleod's unfinished " Dictionary of Political Economy." 

 Mr. Macleod gives a concise, but, I believe, correct account 

 of these events, and as he seems to entertain no theory 

 of periodicity, his evidence is perfectly unbiased. Yet, 

 in the space of a few lines, he unconsciously states this 

 periodicity, saying ; — " Ten years after the preceding 

 crisis of 1763 another of a very severe nature took place 

 in 1772 and the beginning of 1773. It extended over all 

 the trading nations of Europe." A few lines below he 

 goes on to state that in May, 1783, a rapid drain of bul- 

 lion to the Continent set in, which greatly alarmed the 

 Bank directors and embarrassed the merchants. The 



' Nature, vol. xvi. p. 63. 



J 



