The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-08-10
By WALTER w. HEAD, President American Bankers
 AssOciafiOn.

| | Association.
 | NEW YORK, Aug. 9.--We suffer l today from depression of two kinds material and psychological. The latter ms. in many cases, more devastating than the first.
 In this period we all participated. We all enjoyed the temporary excite ment of the fever. We are all suffer- ing in consequence. Few, indeed, can claim exemption by reason of superior wisdom or greater self-restraint. 1t is, | as I have tried to point out, but hu- man nature that the achievement of wealth. instead of producing satisfac- tion. more often produces a desire for more wealth, for new possession, for greater power
 I shall make no attempt to minimize the extent of our material loss in the last four years. No man acquainted with conditions in our agricultural dis tricts. who has been and still is fa- miliar with the problems of the farm CT. can minimize the seriousness of the economic depression. On the other hand. I repeat, too frequently during the recent period of depressionSthe more devastating loss has been the loss of confidence, the loss of confidence in our individual power, the loss of confidence in the ability and integrity to our Tel lows. Mans mind and mans spirit are more potent than dollars made by man. If we revive the one, we shall soon restore the other.
 There was time when man was sat isfied with the qualification of his needs with the bare necessities of existence.
 The desires of one generation begin where those of the last generation ended Our great-grandfathers used and were satisfied with--the tallow candle. Our grandfathers desires some thing better and were satisfied with the kerosene lamp. Our fathers were trained in youth to accept the kerosene lamp as a commonplace of existence and, therefore, desired something more. They devised means of using gas, or manufacturing gas where natural gas was not available. q. We were brought up under gas lights, but developed the electric light. Our children-who look upon the electric light as anything but q novelty-may invent means of storing sunlight in cubes or bottles.
 During the period immediately fol- lowing 1914 men in the United States made money as never before--in large amounts, with minimum effort and, rel atiyely, with little risk. Manufactur- CTS found themselves flooded with or ders, orders for munitions of war in case their factories were equipped to produce them, orders for all sorts of commodities for export trade, to take the place of goods formerly exported by European nations. Producers of food- stuffs suddenly discovered before them market virtually unlimited. Labor enjoyed full time and overtime. The. proverbial dinner pail became so full that the standard of living advanced to new high level.
 Everybody was prosperous and every body's prosperity made all of us still more prosperous.
 Men became millionaires by the pur- chase and sale of horses and mules, of fOodstuffs, of munitions, all of which were necessary and essential eto the warning nations of Europe. A young man just out of college acquired hun dreds of thousands of dollars by the re- fining of potash from sand-hill lakes which no one, before him, had thought worth leasing. Mechanics who had skiped and saved, in order that their sons might finish school, suddenly found themselves possessed of funds in sufficient amounts to send John to coHege-and ample also to provide an automobile for father and a piano for mother. Corporation executives for merly content with $5,000 a year de- manded $10,OO0, $25, 5,000, $5O, ,OO0-and received it.
 That, my friends, is a picture all true all too thoroughly realized today by every one of us. We spent lavishly in those days, not only wisely. Haste-the unchecked insistence upon the imme- diate realization of every desire and every ambition-necessarily produced waste. Many an individual spent for luxuries in single year an amount which, if available today, might save his whole family from poverty. Gov ernments-federal, state and locaI-ex- pended hundreds of millions of dollars, for activities which would not, ordi- narily, have been undertaken and com pleted in a generation.
 End Of Rainbow.
 Suddenly we reached the end of the rainbow. We discovered that an im- poverished Europe might be famished and still be unable to pay us for the food which stood between comfort and starvation. We discovered that there is limit even to the commodities which a aVnation of one hundred million people can consume and pay for. Many of our