"The general shape of the universal delusion may be indicated by three of its familiar features.
"First, the idea that the panacea for debt is credit.
"Second, a social and political doctrine, now widely accepted, beginning with the premise that people are entitled to certain betterments of life.
"Third, the argument that prosperity is a product of credit, whereas from the beginning of economic thought it had been supposed that prosperity was from the increase and exchange of wealth, ad credit was its product.
"Result: Much more debt. A world-wide collapse of foreign trade, by far the worst since the beginning of the modern epoch. Utter prostration of the statistical serpents. Credit representing many hundreds of millions of labor days locked up in idle industrial equipment both here and in Europe. It is idle because people cannot afford to buy its product at prices which will enable industry to pay interest on its debt. One country might forget its debt, set its equipment free, and flood the markets with of the world with cheap goods, and by this offense kill off a lot of competition. But of this thought occurs to all of them, and so all. With one impulse, raise very high tariff barriers against one another's goods, to keep them out.”
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