in other lines of manufacture to prevent the very same plethora of capital that had been affecting the oil business. The great industrial undertakings of the world are practically finished as far as present developments indicate.
As the late David A. Wells says in his "Recent Economic Changes:" "It would seem indeed as if the world during all the years since the inception of civilization has been working upon the line of equipment for industrial effort—inventing and perfecting tools and machinery, building workshops and factories, and devising instrumentalities for the easy communication of persons and thoughts; that this equipment having at last been made ready, the work of using it has, for the first time in our day and generation, fairly begun; and also that every community under prior or existing conditions of use and consumption, is becoming saturated, as it were, with its results."
There is no country in which the industrial machinery is not only so thoroughly completed, but actually oyer-completed, if I may coin a word, as in the United States. In normal conditions the machinery of production will produce more in three days than we can consume in a week. The present boom is recognized by all as destined to be of a most ephemeral nature, and existing conditions no criterion to judge by. It is true that while over-production makes
