ralue ot ^|
THE THEORY OF MODERN WELFARE 209
There is, however, another and more constraining circumstance which hinders the large creditors from wilfully pushing the debtors to a reckoning when things are ripe for liquidation. As was indicated above, the sequence of credit relations in an era of prosperity is endlessly ramified through the business community ; whereby it happens that very few creditors are not also debtors, or stand in such relation to debtors as would involve them in some loss, even if this loss should not be commensurate with their eventual gain at the cost of other debtors. This circumstance by itself has a strong deterrent effect, and when taken in connection with what was said above of the habitual inability of the men in business to appreciate the instability of money values, it is probably sufficient to explain the apparently shortsighted conduct of those large creditors to seek to mitigate the severity of liquidation when the liquidation has come due.
The account here offered of the "method" of crises and eraa of prosperity does not differ greatly from accounts usually met with, except in explaining these phenomena as primarily phenomena of business rather than of industry. The disturbances of the mechanical processes of industry, which are
■QCh ab&res would be the only Tolae uaigned them, and little of k bsM line in the way of a legally impuwd value would rem»in. The de jur* value would no longer bioder a free reoognition o( Uw IwU. — Beport oftht Industrial CommUiion, vol. I. p. 678.