system. It had then grown so large and was so closely articulated a structure that the relations of its members to one another and to the system as a whole were of greater moment for the fortunes of these members and for the orderly process of the whole than were the relations of the members to industrial factors lying outside the system of the machine industry and the business community. Hence industrial crises in the proper sense of the word seem well at home in this period. They spread with great force and facility whenever they came ; and they had the true character of business crises, in that they ran with great severity without involving an appreciable aggregate loss of material wealth, except in terms of price. They commonly meant a cancelment of values, without appreciable aggregate loss of goods. They seem also to have been true to the staple definition of crises in that they followed upon a period of speculative inflation in industrial investmenta.
Chronic depression, however, does not seem to belong, as a consistent feature of the course of things, in this nineteenth-centurj period, prior to