Excerpt from About Panics: Hard Times, the Cause and the Cure What I mean by panics are those periods of business depression, which, in this country, come and go, and come and go again, so that their periodicity is almost determinable by their regu lar recurrence - those periods of depression when we have millions of idle men tramping the coun try looking for work, when our great railroad systems have thousands of cars idle on side tracks and hundreds of engines rusting in the round houses, when millions of dollars lie idle in the vaults of our banking institutions, when the wheels of industry are almost stopped, and busi ness failures increase; when prominent business men, tired of whistling for prosperity, commit suicide because they cannot stand the strain of' business failure after their long or short period of business success. These periods of depression are worse than war, pestilence, and, I had almost said, famine, for to hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens they really mean famine, or starvation, which is the same thing. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.