all the consequences of their incapacity.  No one thought it wrong for a light-witted “captain of industry” who had led his workpeople into overproduction, into the disproportionate manufacture, that is to say, of some particular article, to abandon and dismiss them, nor was there anything to prevent the sudden frantic underselling of some trade rival in order to surprise and destroy his trade, secure his customers for one’s own destined needs, and shift a portion of one’s punishment upon him.  This operation of spasmodic underselling was known as “dumping.”  The American ironmasters were now dumping on the British market.  The British employers were, of course, taking their loss out of their workpeople as much as possible, but in addition they were agitating for some legislation that would prevent—­not stupid relative excess in production, but “dumping”—­not the disease, but the consequences of the disease.  The necessary knowledge to prevent either dumping or its causes, the uncorrelated production of commodities, did not exist, but this hardly weighed with them at all, and in answer to their demands there had arisen a curious party of retaliatory-protectionists who combined vague proposals for spasmodic responses to these convulsive attacks from foreign manufacturers, with the very evident intention of achieving financial adventures.  The dishonest and reckless elements were indeed so evident in this movement as to add very greatly to the general atmosphere of distrust and insecurity, and in the recoil from the prospect of fiscal power in the hands of the class of men known as the “New Financiers,” one heard frightened old-fashioned statesmen asserting with passion that “dumping” didn’t occur, or that it was a very charming sort of thing to happen.  Nobody would face and handle the rather intricate truth of the business.  The whole effect upon the mind of a cool observer was of a covey of unsubstantial jabbering minds drifting over a series of irrational economic cataclysms, prices and employment tumbled about like towers in an earthquake, and amidst the shifting masses were the common work-people going on with their lives as well as they could, suffering, perplexed, unorganized, and for anything but violent, fruitless protests, impotent.  You cannot hope now to understand the infinite want of adjustment in the old order of things.  At one time there were people dying of actual starvation in India, while men were burning unsalable wheat in America.  It sounds like the account of a particularly mad dream, does it not?  It was a dream, a dream from which no one on earth expected an awakening.

To us youngsters with the positiveness, the rationalism of youth, it seemed that the strikes and lockouts, the overproduction and misery could not possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and feeling.  We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils.  We fled therefore to that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—­we called them “plots”—­against the poor.