On the centre or axle of the wheel of wealth, from which every side and aspect of it can be surveyed, stand two groups of dealers, the one with their eyes fixed on the material commodities circling around it, and the other on the fluid atmosphere of paper credits which attend these commodities and surround them, as we have seen, as a more rarefied medium of motor industrial power. The first group is composed of the dealers on the Corn Exchange, the Coal Exchange, the Iron and Steel Exchange, the Cotton Exchange, and the rest; and their function is to ascertain as accurately as possible the amounts of the special commodities in which they deal which are being thrown on the productive side of the wheel from the reservoirs and laboratories of fixed capital - the cornfields, the mines, the mills, factories, and workshops - and what amounts of these are being taken off on the other side of the wheel by the consumers as these commodities are successively transformed on their way round into the actual food, clothing, and other articles of necessity or luxury on which the population lives.

The other group of dealers on the axle comprises the great financiers, bankers, bill-brokers, and stock-exchange speculators, who keep their eyes on the one hand on the issues of paper credits of all kinds, and on the other, on their periods and modes of payment, and the extent to which they are being redeemed and extinguished. And the two groups are so interconnected that nothing of importance can occur in the one but is quickly communicated to the other. Now when the dealers in the real commodities ascertain that consumption is likely to fall off from any cause whatever - whether political, social, or economic - they know well, what the orthodox economists ignore, that the productive side of the wheel must slow down to adapt to it. On the other hand should the consumption of commodities give signs of increasing, they know that the cornfields, the mines, and the workshops will be stimulated to the utmost to keep up with this prospective increase in consumption. But they do not wait for the producers to find all this out for themselves.

On the contrary they do it for them by the tariff of market prices which they chalk on the blackboards of their several Exchanges, and hoist in advance like storm or fair weather signals, whereby all the producers concerned in working the fixed capital of the nation may know when to extend their operations and when to contract them, when to take more corn or cotton land into cultivation, when to open new mines or to increase the output from old ones, or to build new machinery, warehouses, or railways, and when on the other hand to leave them as they are, to contract them, or to let the least productive and profitable of them fall altogether out of use. In this way the dealers on the Corn, Cotton, and other Exchanges for commodities perform (although for private gain) a public function similar to that of the governor valve of an engine; they steady the revolutions of the Wheel of Wealth through their tariff* of market prices, by adjusting the productive side of the wheel to the consumption side; and bo prevent the waste or destruction of wealth which would result if more were produced than could or would be consumed, or the inconvenience and expense that would ensue if less were being produced than was required.

Now with this delicate and sensitive mechanism for the accurate adaptation of Production to Consumption, it is not likely that in the course of ordinary business any great crisis can occur when there are no revolutionary inventions or discoveries looming on the horizon, and when no new and colossal industrial speculative enterprises whose future is uncertain are being suddenly flung on the world. But it so happens that among the group of bankers, financiers, and other credit dealers whose legitimate public function, (although pursued as we have said for private gain), is to steady the movement of the wheel, are a number of dealers, company promoters, stock exchange speculators, and others, who deal in and issue paper credits on the faith of industrial enterprises not yet begun, and the outcome and results of which lie still 'on the knees of the gods' in the distant or unknown future. Now these men, although, like all the dealers in paper credits, nominally the lackeys and dependents of the real producers who make the wealth of a nation, succeed in only too many instances in becoming their masters, by taking advantage of their own economic position to usurp new and dangerous functions - like those eunuchs at the courts of the Roman Emperors who by their flatteries drew on their imperial masters to new designs, beneficent or otherwise, when the actual necessities of the world they controlled would otherwise not have stirred them in their imperial seats.

By highly coloured prospectuses and other commercial cajoleries, these dealers seduce not only the legitimate credit dealers and the legitimate dealers on the Exchanges for real commodities, but landowners, mine owners, manufacturers, and the other classes engaged in production, into industrial enterprises whose issues in many, if not most, cases cannot by any possibility be foreseen by any individual or class of men whatever.

Now it is only in connection with these paper credits based on future and unknown contingencies, that any opening for great financial crises and disasters can arise, - and this for two reasons. In the first place, in ordinary credit as in ordinary cash transactions, the actual goods must be delivered before the paper credit obligations are contracted; but in credits based on undertakings not yet begun, and where the commodities which it is hoped they will produce have as yet no existence as for example in joint stock enterprises formed for the opening up of new mines, reclaiming new lands, building railways for the opening up of new countries, or manufacturing new and as yet untried classes of goods; - in all these cases, on the contrary, the credits must be advanced before the goods are delivered; and as these credits are converted into money, either before the works are undertaken or during the course of their construction, and so cannot be redeemed until these works are finished and the commodities on the strength of which the credits were drawn are actually produced, the consequence is that for the time being they are a pure addition to the already existing swarm of credits circling around the wheel. And as result, one of three things must happen.