This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX CRISES IN THE UNITED STATES I To-day, seven years after the last great crisis in the United States, one hears occasional reechoes of the crash. The country is emerging from the depression succeeding that crisis, and one is tempted to ask: "What are crises? How do they arise? Are they necessary evils, like lightning which comes to clear a torrid atmosphere?" These are matters which it is proposed to broach in this chapter, and, together with a succinct sketch of the history of financial disturbances in the United States, to seek some conclusion as to the nature of crises. For our purpose it will be more satisfactory to discuss a few results of investigations into crises and their composition than to launch ourselves bodily forth into an almost illimitable analysis of detail.1 Within the scope of this volume it will be possible only to state the case, as it were, in chapter heads. There is no phase of banking which is more alluring to the historically practical mind than the subject of those mysterious disturbances 1 For those who would study figures and enter minutely into analytical research, most of the books cited in footnotes in this chapter will offer a tempting starting-point, especially Charles A. Conant, A History of Modern Banks of Issue, and Wesley C. Mitchell, Business Cycles. which have visited us every ten or a dozen years in the form of a contraction of loans, a scarcity (sometimes) of currency, a lost stock exchange equilibrium, a derangement of relative credits, both in domestic and foreign exchanges. Why, in the midst of piping prosperity, need and distress should seize our financial and economic system--that is the question. It has not been adequately answered. There exists a wide difference of opinion among...