A scientific study of business cycles, such as that carried out with large scope and exhaustive detail by Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, shows that they are complex organic movements, belonging to a common general type—as indicated by successive periods of confidence and depression, of high and low prices, and so on—but differing greatly from one another, altering fundamentally with the development of business methods, and showing no such pendulum-like regularity in time as is often supposed. “The notion that crises have a regular period of recurrence,” it seems, “is plainly mistaken.” “These cycles differ widely in duration, in intensity, in the relative prominence of their various phenomena, and in the sequence of their phases.”[4] Professor Mitchell’s work is an excellent example of what a scientific study of social process, in the economic sphere, should be, and of the uses and limits of the statistical method. The same sort of objection holds good against the idea that social organisms of any sort, and more especially nations, are subject to a _definite_ law of growth and decay, which enables us to predict their fate in advance. No doubt they must all “have their closes” sooner or later, but the process is complex and in part within the sphere of will, so that there is no exact way of predicting how it will work out. So far as nations have decayed in the past it has been because their systems became too rigid for change, or took on a form which demoralized the people, or proved unable to resist conquest, or in some other way failed to work effectually. These dangers are difficult to avoid, and it is not surprising that most nations have succumbed to them, but sound institutions intelligently adapted to change might avert them indefinitely. It may even be said that there are nations which have lived throughout historical time. The Jews, for example, have kept their national consciousness and their fundamental ideas. Some modern nations, as France and England, have endured many centuries and show no lack of vigor. Predictions based on a supposed law of this nature are constantly proving false. At almost any time during the last three centuries English writers could be found likening the condition of their country to that of imperial Rome, and predicting a similar downfall; and recently America has been threatened with a like fate. Many have judged France and Spain to be hopelessly on the downward path, and have elaborated theories of the causes of their decay, which have proved somewhat supererogatory. My own impression is that the freer and more intelligent forms of national life arising under modern conditions are likely, when well established, to have a much longer life than older forms, the reason being that they are plastic and capable of rational adaptation. There will be ups and downs, but the actual dissolution of a self-conscious modern nation is hard to conceive.