During his first months in the White House, when President Coolidge
went across the land, he observed that national economic and industrial
progress had run in a parallel course to the line of progress which he saw
while he shuttled from Northampton to Boston and back during the two
decades of his public service. Electrical invention had been knitting ali
industry in all America into a close class-conscious structure, into inter-
locking directorates, into industrial homogeneity. Here was a new fiduciary
invention--produced by electrical financial welding, highly effective, highly
possessive rather than creative. The savings mounting in the hanks of the
little Massachusetts towns were but replicas of mounting savings in tens of
thousands of various institutions, trust companies, building and loans, in-
surance companies, savings banks, mortgage companies all over his Amer-
ica. These savings, by the legerdemain of new business methods and morals
had become one lake of capital, placid on the surface, sustained in its
waterline by constant springs in the hills while it was being drained slowly
into Wall Street. ¹ It was a lake of debt--bonds, mortgages, preferred
stock, ² all sorts of curious evidences of obligation were dumped into the
lake replacing the fluid capital drained off the cash reserves. Thus as the
machines to make machines had been creating industrial debt in plant
expansion, the secondary machines themselves were speeding up consump-
tion, piling up goods and chattels at the factory doors. The economic
problem of perpetual motion seemed to be solved. Production had been
hooked up to the golden machine of perennial credit. We were making

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