paralyzed, and all the workmen will suffer damage.[217-8] [217-9] [Footnote 217-1: As _Ferguson_, History of Civil Society, says, the person who thinks that all violent passions are produced by the influence of gain or loss, err as greatly as the spectators of Othello's wrath who should attribute it to the loss of the handkerchief.] [Footnote 217-2: If all the rich were suddenly to become misers, live on bread and water, and go about in the coarsest clothing, etc., it would not be long before all commodities, the circulating medium excepted, would feel the want of a proper market--all, including even the most necessary means of subsistence, because a multitude of former consumers, having no employment, would be obliged to discontinue their demand. Over-production would be greater yet if a great and general improvement in the industrial arts or in the art of agriculture had gone before. Compare, _Lauderdale_ Inquiry, 88. This author calls attention to the fact that a market in which the middle class prevails must put branches of production in operation very different from those put in operation where there are only a few over-rich people, and numberless utterly poor ones: England, the United States--the East Indies, and France before the Revolution. (Ch. 5, especially p. 358.)] [Footnote 217-3: If England, for instance, became bankrupt as a nation, the country would not therefore become richer or poorer. The national creditors would lose about £28,000,000 per annum, but the taxpayers would save that sum every year. Now, of the former, there are not 300,000 families; of the latter there are at least 5,000,000. Hence, the loss would there amount to £100 a family per annum, and the gain here to not £6 per family. We may therefore assume with certainty that the two items would not balance each other as to consumption. The creditors of the nation, a numerous, and hitherto a largely consuming class, now impoverished, would be obliged to curtail their demand for commodities of every kind to a frightful extent; while a great many taxpayers would not feel justified in basing an immediate increase of their demand on so small a saving. Other revolutions, more political in character, may operate in the same direction by despoiling a brilliant court, a luxurious nobility or numerous official classes of their former income.]