192 BANKING THEORIES IN UNITED STATES

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That crises recur periodically came to be believed while the
century was still young — much earlier, it seems, than some
present-day writers realize.! A writer of 1829 informs us that

an opinion is entertained by many that every fourteen years or thereabouts,
 there is a sort of revolution in property —that real estate, especially,
undergoes a speculative rise and fall, and that consequently wealth becomes
transferred from one individual to another, by the mere operation of time.
Without pretending to decide upon the fact, whether or no these fluctuations
 are as frequent as once in fourteen years, one thing we know to be
certain, which is, that fluctuations do take place.?

James Buchanan, then Senator from Pennsylvania, declared in
1840 that the “cycle” (which he attributed to ‘periodical expansions
 and contractions of the currency” and to speculation)
used to require from three to six years, but had now been completed
 in two years? Amasa Walker believed that the period was
seven years, and Bowen, after quoting Lord Overstone’s observation
 that the state of trade “revolves apparently in an established
 cycle,” remarked that crises occur, both in the United
States and England, “on an average, about once in every seven
or eight years.” ® Another writer thought ten to fifteen years in
better accord with the facts.® Most writers were content to assert
that business is subject to more or less periodic fluctuations, without
 attempting to estimate the length of the period. A contributor
 to Hunt's Merchants’ Magazine in May, 1848, described
the country as then being convulsed by “another of those crises,
which recur with apparently tidal regularity,”” while the Massachusetts
 legislature was told, even before the collapse of 1837,
that “periodical revulsions occur, where banks obtain, about
every three years, rising and falling within that space, with as
much regularity as the billows of the ocean, and from causes as
infallible in their operation.” 8 One writer even ventured to de-1
 See, for example, A. B. Adams, Economics of Business Cycles, p. 29.
? [Raguet?] Free Trade Advocate (1829), i, 303. 3 Niles’ Register, vii, 422.
s A. Walker, Nature and Uses of Money and Mixed Currency (1857), p- 35-5
 Bowen, Principles of Political Economy (1856), p. 435.
8 Hunt's Merchants’ Magazine (1850), xxii, 401.
7 D. M. Balfour, “ The Present Commercial Crisis,” Hunt's Merchants’ Magazine
(May, 1848), xviii, 477.
8 Rantoul, Speech in Massachusetts House of Representatives (March 22, 1836),

D. 14.