THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY, A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS. YOL. I. FEBRUARY, 1858. NO. IV. THE GREAT FAILURE. THE crucial fact, in this epoch of commercial catastrophes, is not the stop- page 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 civil- ized globe. AVe have had presented to us, within the last quarter, the remark- able, though by no means novel, specta- cle 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 prpfound 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 pes- tilence 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 Con- stantinople, 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 ui 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 is. In a difficult or complicated case, a great deal is often accomplished when the terms of it are clearly stated. It is not enough, in considering the effects before us, to say that they are the results of a panic. No doubt there has been a panic, a contagious consterna- tion, spreading itself over the commercial world, and strewing the earth with in- numerable wrecks of fortune ; but that accounts for " nothing, and simply de- scribes a symptom. What is the cause of the panic itself? These daring Yan- kees, who are in the habit of braving the wildest tempests on every sea, these stur- dy English, who march into the mouths of devouring cannon without a throb, these gallant Frenchmen, who laugh as they scale the Malakoff in tlu> midst of belch- ing fires, are not the men to run like sheep before an imaginary terror. When a whole nation of such drop their arm and scatter pai, u, there must be something behind the panic; thereVOL. I.⁠ 25