Grant
that we have a hundred thousand men out of work, and hundreds of
thousands more dependent on them--do you think it no small thing
that the vast mass should be left for one, two, three years
seething in sorrow and distress, while they are waiting for
trade! By the time that comes they may have gone beyond the hope
of rescue. Ah! if an elastic trade comes back to-morrow, you can
never make those people what they were; ought we not to have
forecast that they should not be what they are? But I contend
that depression has become chronic, the poverty more wide-spread
and persistent--how then shall we, who represent these classes
among the rest, face the prospect?"
Here interposed a gentleman high in office, a pure, keen, rigid
economist of the highest intellectual and political rank.
"My dear Sterling, pardon me if I say you are talking wildly.
Perhaps you don't see that you are verging on rank communism.
The working of economic laws can be as infallibly projected as a
solar eclipse. You can secure no class from periodic calamity,
and so regulate laws of supply and demand by guiding-wheels of
legislation and taxation as to save every man from penury. You
wish us to send away our bone and sinew because we have no
present employment for it, and next year, or the year after,
under a recovered trade you will be wringing your hands and
cursing the folly that prompted you to do it.
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