Then
followed, with a blind and mad succession, a time of famine, when money
could not buy the super-abundance that vanished, none knew how or why.
"The money itself vanished from time to time, and disappeared into the
vaults of the Accumulation, for no better reason than that for which it
poured itself out at other times. Our theory was that the people--that is
to say, the government of the people--made the people's money, but, as a
matter of fact, the Accumulation made it and controlled it and juggled
with it; and now you saw it, and now you did not see it. The government
made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper money that the
Accumulation made. But whether there was scarcity or plenty, the failures
went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our larger
economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called
financial panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recuperation.
"There was no law in our economy, but as the Accumulation had never cared
for the nature of law, it did not trouble itself for its name in our order
of things. It had always bought the law it needed for its own use, first
through the voter at the polls in the more primitive days, and then, as
civilization advanced, in the legislatures and the courts.
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