But we may fairly say, in recording the facts, that
there has been a concentration of untoward circumstances which have converged upon us last week with such force that no country could have resisted it. We have not worked hard-enough to earn our living ; true, but Heaven -knows that most of our idleness has been unwilling, and that it has been an idleness shared with other millions in both- hemispheres. The new productivity of other nations, their tariffs and their post-War poverty have diminished their power and their desire to take our goods. When we come to the gold itself, round which the trouble is centred because it betokens the wealth which it is not itself, we must go back to the Treaty of Versailles and reparations for the origin of troubles never expected then. Arrangements then made so worked out that a quantity of gold, never equalled in history, has now been accumulated in one country which cannot use it. There it lies, sterilized, affording far less credit for the progress of the world in industry than it would if it were in any way circulating ; and it is even actively hurting us all by sending up its price elsewhere, by its rarity, in relation to the price of goods and commodities whose. prices have therefore sunk until the trade by which we live becomes less and less possible. -It is not our fault that the gold standard has been so intolerably strained, nor that the idea of an international conference on gold has come to -nothing. * - * * *
