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the straight line, the country is falling into depression. If we studythis chart in the fifty years from 1892 to 1941 we see that therewere twenty-four years below and twenty-four years above normaland two at the normal line. The years of prosperity and depressionwere equally divided, which certainly does not support the assumptionthat prosperity was our normal state.The figures given above represent the duration of booms and depressionsin time. Now let us compare them in volume. The dataindicate that in bulk the depressions were 15 per cent greater thanthe booms.Now let us compare the first 25 years with the second. In thefirst 25 years the proportion of prosperity to depression was 13.6years of boom to 10 of depression. In the second 25 years the proportionis reversed—13.5 years of depression to 11.6 of boom. If wecompare the volume of boom and crisis in these two periods thepicture is far darker. In the first 25 years the proportion of boomto depression was 1.1 to 1. In the second 25 years it is 1 of boom to3 of depression. Indeed, the depression which began in 1929 is thelongest in the history of the country.I do not lengthen out this description as food for the reader'spessimism. I do it to compel him to look with complete candor onthe gravity of the problem which stands before him. If we willexamine this chart a little more closely we will become aware of avery sobering fact. In the last twenty-five year period we had twobooms. One lasted from 1915 to the middle of 1920. It was athoroughly unhealthy boom produced altogether by the war inflation.The second was from 1923 to 1929. This was the so-calledNew Era. Few now make any defense of that. It was generated bya wild, speculative activity that ended in catastrophe. Two boomsin twenty-five years and both based on unhealthy phenomena! Is itnot time, therefore, that we bring ourselves to complete franknessand realism in the examination of our position? We are now in acrisis which is in no way comparable to those depressions that succeededbooms in a kind of rhythmic fashion. The present crisis isnot one of those corrective emergencies in which the infectiouselements are washed out by the fever. We are in a condition in whichthe motor elements in our economic system are definitely enervated.168