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EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***
Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen and PG Distributed
Proofreaders. Produced from page scans provided by Cornell University.
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY,
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
* * * * *
VOL. I.--FEBRUARY, 1858.--NO. IV.
* * * * *
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.
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