The Possible Collapse of Civilisation - Page 2

the City of
Westminster, and so on, and I use these stocks and shares as a sort of
interest-bearing money. If I want money to spend, I sell a railway share
much as one might change a hundred-pound banknote; if I have more cash
than I need immediately I buy a few shares. I perceive that the value of
these shares oscillates, sometimes rather gravely, and that the value of
the alleged money on the cheques I get also oscillates as compared with
the things I want to buy; that, indeed, the whole system (which has only
existed for a couple of centuries or so, and which keeps on getting
higher and giddier) is perpetually swaying and quivering and bending and
sagging; but it is only when such a great crisis occurs as that of 1907
that it enters my mind that possibly there is no limit to these
oscillations, that possibly the whole vast accidental edifice will
presently come smashing down.

Why shouldn't it?

I defy any economist or financial expert to prove that it cannot. That
it hasn't done so in the little time for which it has existed is no
reply at all. It is like arguing that a man cannot die because he has
never been known to do so. Previous men have died, previous
civilisations have collapsed, if not of acute, then of chronic financial
disorders.

The experience of 1907 indicated very clearly how a collapse might
occur. A panic, like an avalanche, is a thing much easier to start than
stop. Previous panics have been arrested by good luck; this last one in
America, for example, found Europe strong and prosperous and helpful. In
every panic period there is a huge dislocation of business enterprises,
vast multitudes of men are thrown out of employment, there is grave
social and political disorder; but in the end, so far, things have an
air of having recovered. But now, suppose the panic wave a little more
universal--and panic waves tend to be more extensive than they used to
be. Suppose that when securities fall all round, and gold appreciates in
New York, and frightened people begin to sell investments and hoard
gold, the same thing happens in other parts of the world. Increase the
scale of the trouble only two or three times, and would our system
recover? Imagine great masses of men coming out of employment, and angry
and savage, in all our great towns; imagine the railways working with
reduced staffs on reduced salaries or blocked by strikers; imagine
provision dealers stopping consignments to retailers, and retailers
hesitating to give credit. A phase would arrive when the police and
militia keeping order in the streets would find themselves on short
rations and without their weekly pay.

What we moderns, with our little three hundred years or so of security,
do not recognise is that