The double reservoir at the top shows the amount of money in the hands of individuals and available for expenditure in consumption. This is what we h… - William Trufant Foster

Unless disputants understand the meaning attached by each other to the terms of a controversy, they may worry along indefinitely without making an inch of progress. The contending parties may think they agree on the proposition, when, as a matter of fact, their apparent agreement is due to ambiguity in the use of the terms. On the other hand, the contending parties may work themselves into a quarrel over imaginary disagreements concerning ideas, when in fact they are merely confused as to the meaning of words. Disputes which seem interminable are sometimes ended abruptly and happily upon the accidental discovery that the parties in dispute agreed all the time as to the real questions at issue, while neither side understood what the other side meant.

One of the early presidents of Harvard College wrote a dissertation on the question, "Whether angels speak any language; if so, whether it is Hebrew." Much futile discussion on such questions has at various times brought debating into ill repute. A question should offer something more than an ingenious exercise; it should offer the chance of arriving at some conclusion regarded by the particular audience or disputants as of some practical importance. It should be discarded if, like the proposition, "The pen is mightier than the sword/' it offers no possibility of arriving at reasonably sound conclusions through the process of argument.

The daily expenditures by consumers for new consumers' goods, upon which business stability largely depends, are determined in part by the total volume of money in circulation, in part by other factors including the frequency with which that money is returned to consumers. The flow of money, therefore, from use in consumption to another use in consumption should not be overlooked in studies of the causes and conditions of business fluctuations. It is the purpose of this paper to describe certain aspects of this circuit flow of money, to raise the question whether it does not deserve more attention that it has yet received in our analyses of business cycles, and to suggest pertinent lines of investigation. Unfortunately, the statistics upon which the most important conclusions concerning this subject must be based are not at hand and are not likely to be for a long time to come. The following discussion will have served its purpose if it stimulates further inquiry in profitable directions and helps to hasten the day when the necessary statistics are available.