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153. Great Wars Seldom if Ever Produce but Often Avert or Remedy Crises.-Great wars are sometimes assumed to be fitting causes to which to attribute commercial crises. They involve, however, a double action. They exhaust resources, but

if these resources happen to be a glut of unsalable products, this exhaustion by removing the glut sets the wheels in motion, having the effect of a wider market or an increased consumption. They call for large expenditures of money, but they frequently manufacture most of the money they call for, and by adding to the volume of paper money they raise prices and induce that feeling of profit and success in all occupations which stimulates effort. They also, by endangering the accumulations of the rich, render them generous in giving part to save the whole. They stimulate the feeling of mutual dependence and reciprocal sacrifice in both poor and rich, terminating for the time the parsimony of the latter and the discontent of the former, and welding society into a more highly organized unity. All these influences increase the activity of the societary movement and the rate of production.

Hence many nations have made their most rapid advancement, and the rise from poverty to wealth has been most easy, during or immediately after great wars. In the Northern States, during their war with the Confederacy, the bounties offered by Federal, State and municipal authorities on enlistment rose to from $1,000 to $1,500 per man, thus making manhood more valuable relatively to capital. Long periods of peace, however, tighten the ascendency of capital over labor, and it is doubtful if they do not increase the timidity of capital in embarking in new enterprises. The period from 1805 to 1816, both in the United States and England, was a period, the first part of which represented partial or total embargoes on foreign trade, and the last years of which were war. Yet these were years of great prosperity to the common people, while the ten years of peace and free intercourse, immediately following, were years of destitution in both countries. Wheat in the United States for the five years, 1810 to 1815, held an average price in the United States of $11.60 per barrel, while in the ten years after the war it was from $4 to $1.25 per barrel, or twenty cents per bushel. At Pittsburg a ton of bar iron cost eighty barrels of flour. The cotton manufacture had increased ninety-fold under nonintercourse. Instead of absorbing 1,000 bales it absorbed 90,000.

The intimate relation between the high prices for products, that are incident to periods of war, and the prosperity of the working and business classes, may be seen by noting the rise in the prices

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