A man with a thousand dollars buys a five thousand dollar lot.  He knows he can’t pay for it, but there’s a boom and he expects to sell for six thousand before the second payment is due.  He doesn’t sell.  When he can’t sell he goes to the bank to borrow money to make the payment; he finds there many more in the same condition as himself.  The banks see the trouble coming and will not loan.  When the banks refuse to loan the depositors get scared and take their money out of the bank.  During that great panic in the nineties three hundred millions of dollars were taken out of circulation within four months by depositors who were scared.  Then the country gets flat on its back with a panic.  A friend said to me, during the great depression:  “Don’t you think it will be over soon?” I replied:  “Let a man have typhoid fever until reduced to a skeleton; let the doctor call some morning toward the close of the long siege and say, ’The fever is broken, get up and go to work.’  Can the man obey the doctor?  No; he must have chicken-broth and gruel, and slowly regain his strength.”  So when a panic comes we must creep out, and we were so deep in the nineties it took a long time to recover.

When a panic comes however, the extravagance ceases; everybody gets stingy.  A man with five thousand dollars doesn’t buy a five thousand dollar lot.  He doesn’t buy anything; his wife must wear the old bonnet, and his church assessment is reduced.  Then the tide turns and the country recovers from its extravagance.  But when times get good, crops are fine and money plentiful, the people begin again; women spending their money for dry goods, men for wet goods; another era of extravagance is on and another panic coming.

Mr. Whitney said:  “Too much silver and too much tariff.”  All the gold and all the silver money in this country would not pay the old man’s drink and tobacco bill for five years.  We drink, smoke and chew up all the money in this country, gold, silver, and paper, every seven years.  Last year we spent about six millions for missions; one hundred and fifty millions for churches; two hundred and seventy-five millions for schools; and eighteen hundred millions for intoxicating liquors and tobacco.  Awake, O Conscience! and pour out thy saving influence for the healing of the nation.

We live in a marvelous country.  What this republic has accomplished in one hundred and thirty-eight years, is the wonder of the world.  At the close of the Revolutionary War those who survived were poor, wounded, bleeding people, occupying only the eastern rim of a wilderness waste, while wild beast and wilder Indians roamed the mighty expanse to the western ocean.  From the penniless poverty of then, has come the wonderful wealth of now.  Where the tangled wilderness choked the earth, now fields of golden grain dot the plains, carpets of clover cover the hillsides, cities hum with the music of commerce, while rivers and railroads carry rich harvests to the harbors of every land.  Emerson wrote better than he knew when he wrote: