CAUSES OF CRISES AND CYCLES 207

which are fleeting and fallacious, consumption is increased.” !
A writer in De Bow's Review adopted the same view, and gave an
inkling of its basis. It is futile, he urged, to seek in a fool-proof
currency the preventive of the disasters that inevitably follow
overconsumption. “The actual money of a country, or of several
nations, consists only in a very small degree of either the paper
circulating as money, or of specie. It is really formed of all exchangeable
 products. So long as any country, or section of a
country, has surplus products of its industry to sell, it has money.
. . . All commercial revulsions resolve themselves into the same
elements, and always arise from the primary fact that more has
been consumed than produced.” ?

! Tucker, Theory of Money and Banks Investigated (1839), p. 40. See also the
less lucid statement in the Democratic Review (April, 1848), xxii, 376.
? T. P. Kettell, “The Money of Commerce,” De Bow’s Review (Oct., 1848),
vi, 247. Notice that this conception of crises as the aftermath of profligate consumption
 considered them only in their international (or intersectional) relations;
that is, as precipitated by a drainage of specie through the foreign exchanges. It
did not take into consideration crises produced by such ill-balanced investments of
capital among different industries as Dew and Walker referred to.