increasing persistency, chronic depreasion has been the rule rather than the exception in business. Seasons of easy times, " ordinary prosperity," during this period are pretty uniformly traceable to specific causes extraneous to the process of industrial business proper. In one case, the early nineties, it seems to have been a peculiar crop situation, and in the most notable case of a speculative inflation, the one now (1904) apparently drawing to a close, it was the Spanish-American War, coupled with the expenditures for stores, munitions, and services incident to placing the country on a war footing, that lifted the depreasion and brouglit prosperity to the business community. If the outside stimulus from which the present prosperity takes its impulse be continued at an adequate pitch, the season of prosperity may he prolonged; otherwise there seems little reason to expect any other outcome than a more or less abrupt and searching liquidation.
What would be an adequate pitch of the stimulus making for prosperity is, of course, not easy