368 
DUTTON. 
country and in most half-civilized countries plenty of money 
at all timesj only in the hard times people who want it (badly 
enough, I grant you) are unable to get hold of it. Naturally 
they judge the whole supply by the leanness of their own 
purses ; but the strangest part of it all is the large masses of 
money locked up in the great reservoirs of money anxiously 
waiting and longing for some one to come armed with the 
proper documents and release it from its irksome confine¬ 
ment. At such times money is just as anxious to be had as 
impecunious people are to have it. What is it that keeps these 
two ardent lovers apart ? The usual reply, that it is the want 
of good collaterals, while it may be true in one sense, is 
hardly so in the sense of a real and ultimate cause, for in 
fact good collaterals are as plentiful in hard times as in flush 
ones; but the people who hold the collaterals are not the ones 
who want the money. The true proximate cause is that 
money in its capacity of capital never moves but in the ex¬ 
pectation of profit, and in hard times there is little profit in 
sight. Indeed, hard times mean the scarcity of profits much 
more than the scarcity of real production; and then capital, 
in the form of credit, retires into winter quarters and money 
goes into the strong boxes. But why should there be a gen¬ 
eral dearth of profit at one time and plenty of it at another ? 
The causes are many, and two periods of depression may 
have very different causes; nor does it seem possible to em¬ 
brace them under any one form of statement, unless it be 
one so general that it is of little or no use. Perhaps the 
most frequent cause of depressions is the waste of capital 
and of the surplus of society consequent upon an undue ex¬ 
pansion of credit. When the effects of this waste have be¬ 
gun to press upon the community, as in due time it inevita¬ 
bly must, people must go to work repairing damages and 
restoring the capital to its original efficiency and productive 
power. What would otherwise have been profits are ab¬ 
sorbed in this restoration, and this recuperation is itself 
hampered and retarded by the crippling and diminished 
efficiency of the capital whose restoration must be accom- 
