All governments are delighted with this tariff device, because they are thus enabled to get money from the public without the public's knowing it. "The foreigner pays the tax," we are told, and as a result of this arrangement the steel trust just before the war was selling its product at a high price to the American people, and taking its surplus abroad and selling it to the foreigner at half the domestic price. And we see this same thing in every line of manufacture, and all over the world. We see one nation after another withdrawing itself as a market for manufactured products, and entering the lists as a marketer. One more nation now able to fill all its own needs, and going out hungrily to look for foreign customers, adding to the glut of the world's manufactured products and the ferocity of international competition! At the close of the Civil War the total exports of the United States averaged approximately $300,000,000, and the total imports were about the same. In 1892 the exports first touched $1,000,000,000, while the imports were about nine-tenths of that sum. In the year 1913 the exports were nearly $2,500,000,000, while the imports were $600,000,000 less; and in the year 1920 our exports were over $8,000,000,000 and our imports a little over $5,000,000,000! So we have a "favorable balance" of almost $3,000,000,000 a year--and as a result we are on the verge of ruin! This "iron ring" of overproduction and lack of market exercises upon our industrial body a steady pressure, a slow strangling. But because the body is in convulsions, struggling to break the ring, the pressure of the ring is worse at some times than at others. We have periods of what we call "prosperity," followed by periods of panic and hard times. You must understand that only a small part of our business is done by means of cash payments, whether in gold or silver or paper money. Close to 99% of our business is done by means of credit, and this introduces into the process a psychological factor. The business man expects certain profits, and he capitalizes these expectations. Business booms, because everybody believes everybody else's promises; credit expands like a huge balloon, with the breath of everybody's enthusiasm. But meantime real business, the real market, remains just what it was before; it cannot increase, because of the iron ring which restricts the buying power of the mass of the people by the competitive wage. So presently the time comes when somebody realizes that he has over-capitalized his hopes; he curtails his orders, he calls in his money, and the impulse thus started precipitates a crash in the whole business world. We had such a crash in 1907, and I remember a Wall Street man explaining it in a magazine article entitled, "Somebody Asked for a Dollar."