Great Depression

“ All of the nations have suffered alike in this great depression. They have all reached the conclusion that each can best be helped by the common action of all. It is in this spirit that our visitors have met with us and discussed our common problems. ”

“ The Outbreak in Vienna
The excitement of the people was aggravated by their distrust of the paper money of the realm and by a great depression in commerce and industry. Daily more workmen were thrown out of employment, and soon throngs of the hungry and discontented gathered in the streets. ”

“ We are hurried and immature; the depression drained our vitality because we were told that change in our institutions meant death to our "way of life"; the traditional American eagerness to abandon whatever he had exhausted, died down; the investment was too great and the interests were too complex. So the changes we had to make all seemed revolutionary if not vengeful, and men whose fathers had lived through the Populist rebellion often seriously felt that the recognition of organized labor was the beginning of class warfare in America. ”

“ It has led to great commercial and industrial crises, which have scattered over the civilised world panic and ruin, followed by long-continued stagnation and depression. Thus anarchy, waste, and starvation have been its too frequent attendants, while the normal position of the workmen under it has been precarious and unworthy of free, enlightened men. ”

“ This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle that the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, which not to answer is to be destroyed. ”

“ Before the storm is the calm. Revolution is a storm usually preceded by a calm. Recently, great unrest and spasmodic agitation marked the social life of America. The wage workers suddenly appeared mutinous and even rebellious. Strikes became local insurrections; and the usual servility of the wage slaves seemed to give place to a species of daring, of sullen courage, born of desperation. The hideous phantoms of hunger stimulated the toilers to heroic acts of defiance, that alarmed their masters and paralyzed plutocracy's liveried lackeys of the political oligarchy. ”

“ We have reached, at last, a stage in our national thinking in which it is being more and more widely understood, and more and more generally proclaimed by thoughtful leaders of opinion, that our present depression is primarily of our own making, and that the underlying cause is the maldistribution of wealth. ”

“ And as to the sentimental movement, the great crisis which brought the Union so near to destruction rudely staggered the jubilant Fourth-of-July optimism of former days and reminded the American people of the inherent inadequateness of mere political institutions to the solution of all problems of human society. ”

“ In these great crises of universal history, the ordinary aspects of the class struggle assume a violent, catastrophic expression, developing into war, civil war, and into the searing, magnificent upheavals of the Revolution. ”

“ The harvest of misery is before Our eyes, and the dreadful projects of the most disastrous national upheavals are threatening Us from the growing power of the socialistic movement. They have insidiously worked their way into the very heart of the State, and in the darkness of their secret gatherings, and in the open light of day, in their writings and their harangues, they are urging the masses onward to sedition ”

“ There is distress where large standing armies are maintained, but there is also distress where the standing armies are nominal; there is distress where protective tariffs are applied, but there is also distress where trade is nearly free; there is distress where autocratic government yet prevails, but there is also distress where political power is wholly in the hands of the people ”

“ The great economic crisis beginning in 1873 was accompanied by the characteristic phenomenon that dissatisfaction with the existing economic, social, and political conditions affected wider circles than heretofore, that this embittered people’s minds, and brought about sharp oppositions and struggles of the industrial classes against each other, especially the struggle of labor against capital. ”

“ This state now exists in regard to the money power, the industrial classes of all lands struggling bitterly against it, and combining with a view to its overthrow. Such a state of revolt, bitter, persistent, unrelenting, indicates something innately wrong in the industrial situation, and cannot fail in the end to have its effect. ”

“ So that a universal social collapse followed, as it were a logical consequence, upon world-wide war. Wherever there were great populations, great masses of people found themselves without work, without money, and unable to get food. ”

“ Thus it came about that the era of Great Britain’s greatest prosperity and supremacy as a world-power was the one of greatest industrial oppression and misery at home, a period marked by rebellious uprisings among the people, to be repressed with cruel and bloody severity. It was a period of industrial transition, in which the government flourished and the people suffered, and in which the seeds of revolt and revolution were widely spread on every hand. ”

“ For the first time in the history of our major economic depressions there has been a notable absence of public disorders and industrial conflict. Above all there is an enlargement of social and spiritual responsibility among the people. ”

“ Meanwhile, below the thin and treacherous surface, the volcanic fires of a socialistic agitation were blazing up with daily increasing fierceness. The failure of work to laboring men; the widespread and intense suffering consequent thereupon ”

“ That the main cause and general course of the recurring paroxysms of industrial depression, which are becoming so marked a feature of modern social life, are thus explained, is, I think, clear. And let the reader remember that it is only the main causes and general courses of such phenomena that we are seeking to trace or that, in fact, it is possible to trace with any exactness. Political economy can deal, and has need to deal, only with general tendencies. ”

“ Nay; the pillars of the state are trembling even now, and the very foundations of society begin to quiver with pent-up forces that glow underneath. The struggle that must either revivify, or convulse in ruin, is near at hand, if it be not already begun. ”

“ And beneath will be the abyss, wherein will fester and starve and rot, and ever renew itself, the common people, the great bulk of the population. And in the end, who knows in what day, the common people will rise up out of the abyss; the labor castes and the Oligarchy will crumble away ”

“ The misery that has come over the world during the last ten years (hastened along by the Great War but by no means caused by that sanguinary conflict) is in reality due to a profound change in the economic and social structure of the entire world. ”

“ The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; in the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes ”

“ If we consider what are the chief centres of discontent throughout the civilised world, we shall find that they are the great aggregations of population in wealthy industrial countries. Social unrest is a disease of town-life. Wherever the conditions which create the great modern city exist, we find revolutionary agitation. ”

“ The Great Collapse 1 And now the whole fabric of civilisation was bending and giving, and dropping to pieces and melting in the furnace of the war.
The stages of the swift and universal collapse of the financial and scientific civilisation with which the twentieth century opened followed each other very swiftly, so swiftly that upon the foreshortened page of history--they seem altogether to overlap. To begin with, one sees the world nearly at a maximum wealth and prosperity. To its inhabitants indeed it seemed also at a maximum of security. ”

“ They were the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the armed and fighting class, a base, down-trodden, enslaved multitude, destitute of rights and privileges, their only mission in the world to provide food for and pay taxes to their masters, and often doomed to starve in the midst of the food which their labor produced. ”

“ The oscillations—that is, the political agitations which result from this struggle of labor against power—now lead to a depression of the central force, which compromises the very existence of society; now, exaggerating this same force beyond measure, give birth to despotism. ”

“ Something like a crisis is seen in the United States to-day, brought about by a whole series of concomitant causes, such as business depression, bank failures, industrial disputes terminating in strikes and lockouts, Coxey armies, panicky people, and unsettled views regarding commerce and finance, this last cause predominating. ”

“ What change may come, no mortal man can tell, but that some great change must come, thoughtful men begin to feel. The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward, which will carry us back towards barbarism. ”

“ And out of those bounteous material conditions he would have seen arising, as necessary sequences, moral conditions realizing the golden age of which mankind has always dreamed. Youth no longer stunted and starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars! Foul things fled; discord turned to harmony! For how could there be greed when all had enough? How could there be the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished? ”

“ Whether in the present drifts of opinion and taste there are as yet any indications of retrogression, it is not necessary to inquire; but there are many things about which there can be no dispute, which go to show that our civilization has reached a critical period, and that unless a new start is made in the direction of social equality, the nineteenth century may to the future mark its climax. These industrial depressions, which cause as much waste and suffering as famines or wars, are like the twinges and shocks which precede paralysis. ”

“ The social phenomena which all over the civilized world appall the philanthropist and perplex the statesman, which hang with clouds the future of the most advanced races and suggest doubts of the reality and ultimate goal of what we have fondly called progress, are now explained. ”

“ Nevertheless, these representatives of the great bourgeois revolution were the first shock troops of struggling humanity; they broke thru the dams of feudalism and thereby opened the way to the spring floods of the proletarian revolutions. ”

“ Before 1914 it was apparent that matters were becoming serious, and now the strain of the Great War has so increased the industrial friction inherent in our society [Pg 231] that such friction has become the chief problem confronting civilization. ”

“ In the meantime social and economic conditions with the great masses of the people are very far from what they should be.
Unrest and confusion are strongly in evidence. On the whole, there is far less suffering and destitution than ever before. Oppression and abominations meet with quick and powerful protest from all classes, when exposed, and at least temporary relief is quick to follow. 169
The blame is confined to no one class, rich or poor. The equitable distribution of wealth, resources, and opportunity that have developed beyond all precedent during the last half century, requires time. ”

“ We are living today amidst the storm and stress of one of the most tragic epochs of history. Acute unemployment and economic distress threaten the stability of governments the world over. The very foundations of civilized society are shaken. ”

“ The chimera of a splendid government, administered upon a magnificent scale, has passed off, and left us all the realities of depression, national calamity, and destitution. The lessons of prudence and economy which experience has inculcated should not be lost, but rendered available, that some of the evils incurred may be remedied whilst others may be averted. ”

“ The years 1848-9 had been years of revolution, and, as always happens at such times, the minds of men had been greatly stirred on many questions, and especially on the problem of the social condition of the great mass of the poor in all European countries. ”

“ That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. ”