Thus, then, nothing happened as in the preceding crises, and from 1873 to 1877 all has been new, the phenomena themselves and their causes. There would be reason for surprise and bewilderment at this if one did not admit, with M. De Laveleye, that only now has ceased the industrial and speculative movement which has led Europe for forty years to send her money abroad. New employments for capital are very nearly exhausted; new sources of riches have been exploited as much as they can be. The movement of the last forty years, especially active since 1851, is not merely arrested for a moment to resume its march once more, as in the previous crises; it is definitely terminated. The design of the past movement was the economical furnishing of Europe and of the world: and this equipment is completed, or nearly so. But in giving proof of this assertion and seeking for its justification, M. De Laveleye supplies a very clear account of the direct and specific causes of the crisis through which we are passing. “Western Europe,” he says—“and by this generic expression we mean Europe rich in capital and feeding great foreign enterprises—Western Europe has made a rude return upon herself. She has retaken her money; she has made an inventory of what she possessed abroad, and she shows herself solicitous to preserve, to keep by her, this scattered wealth. The first element of the force of progress, then, is in default; the money is wanting; it is hidden; it is refused. Concurrently, what have the borrowing countries done since 1873? They have abandoned the game and ceased an impossible struggle, which consisted in paying to Western Europe a revenue which was not produced by the soil or by practicable enterprises. They have become bankrupt, and the crisis in their government funds has opened the eyes of the two champions. Each perceived that he was ruined: the borrower by becoming indebted without sufficient motive; the lender not only by lending his capital upon illusory guarantees, but by receiving finally only a part of it, under the form of arrearages.” This is the second cause. As for the third: “It is the depreciation of silver, due to the incapacity and the improvidence of the Western states, which imagined they could make a good stroke of political economy by allowing one of the agents of circulation to debase itself. “Principal possessors of the stock of gold these states have obeyed an egoistic thought in seconding the movement for a single metal as currency—gold; a movement which had for its first effect an increase in the relative value of their metallic circulation. But they took no note of another very grave consequence of this disturbance of equilibrium.