This had come about because money, in the course of its evolution, had developed by three important stages, vide licer, precious metals of gold and silver, bank notes and bank credit, Each was in a sort of geometrical progression of the other. Finally, like an inverted cone, or pyramid, the apex was gold and the upside-down base was bank credit. Only in? this "ever-expanding way could modern industry utilize the aid of all available capital; present surplus and the promise of future. In times of prosperity, this structure is called credit; in depression, it is named debt. But in both cases it is one and the same thing—money in an expanded form.
In one of the American States several thousands of farmers, carrying spades and farm implements, stormed the auction room where iheir holdings were to come under the hammer, and stopped the proceedings effectively. Debtors were universally unable to meet their creditors. Banks began to collapse by the thousand. When the President took office in March 1933 a general moratorium had to be declared.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.