12 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



expansion of business as had occurred a dozen years before under 

 similar circumstances. No matter what we select as a gauge of 

 prosperity, we find the same evidence of a relatively slack develop- 

 ment in the early nineties, as compared with either the upward 

 movement of the early eighties or that of a decade later. We may 

 take the statistics of the per capita foreign trade, or the railway 

 earnings per mile, or the bank clearings, or the stock exchange 

 transactions, or the prices of commodities and securities, and we 

 find them all telling the same story. The maximal records of the 

 period all fell far short of those of the preceding or those of the 

 succeeding cycle of trade. The continued agitation of the silver 

 question and the dwindling reserves of the Treasury, presenting 

 as they did an ominous outlook for our monetary standard, sufficed 

 to prevent any considerable improvement in domestic trade and 

 manufactures, such as otherwise would have resulted from the 

 bountiful harvests and the immense export trade. American se- 

 curities held abroad began to be returned in such quantities as to 

 counteract what would naturally have been an enormously favor- 

 able balance of indebtedness ; and American investors themselves 

 hesitated from risking capital so long as Congress could not be 

 depended upon to maintain the value of the country's money. 

 There was no season of buoyant activity in 1891 and 1892. Trade 

 continued sluggish. Congress had cast a deadening blight over 

 business which even the plenteous bounty of nature was unable 

 to overcome. 



3. A third fact is to be noted in discussing the relations of. 

 the crops to economic cycles in a country which, like the United 

 States, ranges over a very extensive and diversified territory, 

 and produces in different regions several very different crops. 

 These various crops belonging, as they do, to different lati- 

 tudes and soils, subject to very unlike conditions of weather and 

 temperature are by no means bound to stand or fall together. 

 An unusually small harvest in one line may be concurrent with 

 unprecedented abundance in another. The failure of one crop 

 may exert a depressing influence in one part of the country, and 

 yet be more than compensated as regards the country as a whole 

 by expanding production and flourishing activity in another. 



