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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY,

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

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VOL. I.--FEBRUARY, 1858.--NO. IV.

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THE GREAT FAILURE.


The _crucial_ fact, in this epoch of commercial catastrophes, is not the
stoppage of Smith, Jones, and Robinson,--nor the suspension of specie
payments by a greater or less number of banks,--but the paralysis of the
trade of the civilized globe. We have had presented to us, within the
last quarter, the remarkable, though by no means novel, spectacle of
a sudden overthrow of business,--in the United States, in England, in
France, and over the greater part of the Continent.

At a period of profound and almost universal peace,--when there had been
no marked deficit in the productiveness of industry, when there had
been no extraordinary dissipation of its results by waste and
extravagance,--when no pestilence or famine or dark rumor of civil
revolution had benumbed its energies,--when the needs for its enterprise
were seemingly as active and stimulating as ever,--all its habitual
functions are arrested, and shocks of disaster run along the ground
from Chicago to Constantinople, toppling down innumerable well-built
structures, like the shock of some gigantic earthquake.

Everybody is of course struck by these phenomena, and everybody has
his own way of accounting for them; it will not, therefore, appear
presumptuous in us to offer a word on the common theme. Let it be
premised, however, that we do not undertake a scientific solution of
the problem, but only a suggestion or two as to what the problem itself
really