vance, to ten cents a pound, and he sells it on that basis, not his mere purchase price, plus a living profit, which is consumed. He is, therefore, demonstrated, if price be a just test instead of replacement value, to have made upward of one hundred per cent. profit. But he only can replace his stock, for all that has taken place is that, in relation to that stock, money has depreciated. Now suppose, as has happened, he calculated correctly again that sugar would go to twenty cents, and again charged its replacement value plus a living profit. He now, apparently, has turned his ten million dollars' worth of counters into forty million dollars. The average jury, and even some judges, might think that atrocious. The informed business man would probably lie awake at nights trying to devise means of escaping bankruptcy. And why? As the Common Law, and the Supreme Court of the United States, have demonstrated by the Harvester and Collins cases, he understands the real situation. In the first place, at the end of the year, his illusory profit would, at the lowest, have to be divided with the Government. His taxation would, at the least, be fifteen million dollars, and then at any moment, and certainly some time, under demonstrated rules of political economy, the tremendous increase of production, inevitable from the stimulus of such prices, must drive the price below the original price, and probably keep it there for years, until increased consumption catches up with the oversupply thus resulting. His forty million dollars of stock must, therefore, at some time, shrink below the original ten millions, demonstrating a countervailing loss of fifteen million dollars. His account thus would stand at the end with no profits except those upon which he had lived, and with deductions of fifteen million dollars for taxes, (and nothing to meet them with except
