1. _The periods of industrial hardship in the Middle Ages were connected with adverse conditions of production, not with the collapse of prices._ Periods of exceptional hardship in medieval times were mostly due to political oppression, famine, wars, pestilence, and scourges of nature. There being very little of the money economy, there was no development of credit and of credit prices. The money economy began, as has been noted, in the cities. As the use of money spread, as larger commercial enterprises were undertaken, as borrowing and the payment of interest became common, there began to appear in city trading circles, on a small scale, the phenomena of the modern crisis. [Sidenote: European crises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] 2. _In Europe general industrial crises date from 1763 and have occurred at more or less regular intervals since._ It frequently is said that the cycle, or period, of crises is ten years, but it takes an elastic imagination to find support for this in history. The crises of the eighteenth century occurred in 1763, 1783, 1793, these dates marking the close of wars of some magnitude. The crises were not widespread or general, but were more marked in England, which was most developed industrially and in its money economy. Likewise in the nineteenth century, the crises were of unequal force in the various countries, usually being severer in England. The English crises may be roughly dated 1803, 1825, 1838, 1847, 1857, 1864, 1875, 1890. These were attributed to various causes; that of 1825 to over-trading abroad; that of 1847 to railroad-building; that of 1864 to the interruption of the cotton trade and of commerce, as a result of the Civil War in America. While in many parts of England the crisis of 1864 was unusually severe, in other countries it was of little moment. Germany, after several years of great speculative prosperity, had a most severe crisis in 1875; while France (a somewhat significant fact), although prostrated by the war of 1870-71, losing a large amount of wealth, and paying a thousand millions of dollars to Germany as a war indemnity, escaped a commercial crisis almost entirely at that time. [Sidenote: Crises in the United States]