“All these tempests,” says he, speaking of the crises of 1837, 1848, 1857, and 1866, “which reproduced themselves at almost equal intervals, were periods of settlement which marked the impatience of the industrial speculation over-excited during a period of forty years; each time that it had abused credit, each time that there was a disproportion between the engagements entered upon and the available resources, industrial, commercial, and financial Europe received a warning; credit vanished suddenly; there was a series of commercial or industrial failures; there was a violent contraction in the stock exchanges and in business; there was a slackening of new enterprises or of those already in hand; there were more losses than one could reckon. But at each of these momentary and transitory crises a remedy was very quickly found. Thus we had free trade and the upward movement of commercial relations; we had the play of free joint-stock companies; we had the war of secession, which, from a European point of view, was a powerful derivative; finally, during this long period we had the discovery of gold and silver mines, coming annually to swell the stock of metal at the disposal of business and of speculation. Thus these crises were not of long duration. It sufficed to let the overworked market have time to assimilate the stocks of paper or of merchandise from which it suffered, to re-establish the equilibrium between the current debts, circulating capital and credit, and immediately industrial and commercial Europe resumed her progressive march; the new enterprises which presented themselves obtained public favor; the warning was forgotten; the play of credit renewed itself; and after a period of enforced quiet, which never exceeded three years, we felt vibrating anew that febrile activity which, in forty years, has caused a veritable transformation of the world.” This was always the course of these crises in the past. To-day there is nothing like this; on the contrary, “if there be a disproportion between undertakings and resources, it is absolutely the reverse of that which marked the preceding crises: the undertakings are almost null, and the resources are exaggerated.”