The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-01-08

is the more impressive.
 In all the explanations offered for the quick recovery of business and in- dustry, there is constant reference to the fundamental fact that the great agricultural interests of the nation were scarcely affected at all by the panic and industrial depression. Ex- cellent crops at good prices have saw ed the farmers, and through them have saved the nation, from the worst con- sequences of the financial and com lmercial disaster. One curious bit Of testimony on this point comes rom the spokesman of the paint trade. who records that the demand for shelf goods" i. e., paints used for houses an dbarns was maintained at nearly the normal level, while paints used Tn structural, railway manufacturing and technical lines,'' fell off more than fifty per cent. We are now once more assured that the yield of our farms will be satisfactory. Again high prices for food products, which are so seri- ous an element in the cost of living of town dwellers, will enable those that live on the farms to buy, also at high prices, the output of the mills and factories, and thus help to keep town labor employed. Again there is the unsuitable demand for farm labor which strictly limits the number Of the unemployed in the towns to those who are in the wrong pace from choice or accident. The stable founda- ton of agricultural prosperity thus underlies the new era of commerciai and industrial advance upon wn1cn we are entering, as in the past two years it has so successfully upheld the uncertain and damaged super
 Social workers are as directly con- cerned as any class in the commun- ity in the phenomena of panic, de- pression, recovery and prosperity. Their tasks are cut out Tor mem nm ny these successive stages of the indus trial cycle A journal which is con- cerned with their problems may therefore without impertinence or pre- sumption record the passing of these stages, inquire somewhat, not too deeply. into their causes, and point out their bearings on social welfare. Among the assigned causes of the panic of 1907, our friends the econ omists would put the emphasis on the inflated conditions of the years preceding it. The extraordinarily high prices of stocks and bonds, the enormous earnings of railways, the incessant increase of production in ev- cry trade. and the frantic attempts to extend plants and facilities so as to keep up with orders, are still so re- cent as to be within the memory of all notwithstanding the two years gulf of inactivity and depression which divide us from that epoch. So quick Ely have we returned to volume of business almost if not quite as great as that of two years ago. that it has been natural to think that some parti- cular event, some unlucky accident, must have been our undoing, rather than that we merely reaping the na- turaI consequences of the general con- ditions which then prevailed. Accord ingly mention is made of the destruc- tion of property in the San Francisco disaster and in the Russian japanese war, of the failure of the Indian mon- sdon and the consequent famine, de- priving hundreds of millions of peo- ple in that distant country of their normal purchasing power, of bad banking methods and an antiquated national banking and monetary sys- tenn, of the prospective tariff legisla- ton. and of national and state poli- cies hostile to industrial corporations and railways.
 However sure we may be that over weeniug confidence and speculation prepare the way for the cataclysm of financial panic and industrial depres- sion, and however sure we may be that any particular disaster of this kind could have been avoided, even the wise ones among us are not yet wise enough to foresee the event, and to convince their fellows that their fore- sight is not CfeluSion.