At the beginning of the present depression in 1929 there was a group of bright and optimistic economists who prophesied very confidently that we had nothing to fear. Depressions, they said, were bound to come in cycles, once every seven years, to be followed immediately by periods of prosperity. Just how they arrived at that is a little difficult to discover, since their records went back only to 1889, and even for that short period they had to make all sorts of excuses because the thing did not work out in seven-year periods.

Well, we are now in the ninth year of the depression. We have just come through a sort of sub- depression in the midst of the major depression for which we have invented the term, “recession.” The clever little seven-year cycles have not worked out. They never did; they never will. As a plain matter of fact, there is no depression; there is only the end of capitalism.

For capitalism is dead; there is nothing deader. It was killed in action in the year of our redemption, 1918. And it is not getting increasingly difficult to conceal the corpse, for too many people are beginning to be aware that it is a corpse. The Communists are aware of it, the Fascists know it, and the Southern Agrarians and the Distributes have been warning the authority about it for years.

We use to hear a great deal from the capitalists about the business of laissez-faire. The contention was that if industrialism was left to itself it would correct all of its own ill effects. The people driven off the farms would be taken up in industry. The people driven out of work by new inventions would be taken up to again by he constant geometric progression of increasing production. The elimination of wars would justify this increase in the production. Long hours and slavery would eventually give place to almost limitless leisure for the workingmen. There would be a new greater Golden Age and left capitalism to itself.

Now the cry of the capitalists has changed. They are no longer asking to be left alone. They are asking for more and more interference. They are asking the government to feed vast masses of people who are left starving cause of the inability of the capitalist system to provide for them.

They are asking the government to find some method of saving the agricultural system already ruined by commercialism. Instead of eliminating wars they have brought about a condition where by all wars must be world wars. They have failed everywhere only to be self-corrective and even to be capable of correction from without. The finale of the failure was the debacle of 1918 and the chaos that has followed.

Now we are left with what they call a depression and that I call a vast void. We have listened to the capitalist Cry of Progress and Going Forward long enough and it has brought us to this sorry pass. It is now time to go backward to better and older things.