LAWS OF NATURE IN ECONOMIC AFFAIRS 231

These economic cycles of the order of magnitude of about a quarter of
a century, which W. W. Rostow detects in a British setting, are articu-
lated by him as follows:

(i) A.D. 1790—1815: A war-period of economic stagnation and of decline
in real wages.1

(ii) A.D. 1815 to the end of the eighteen-forties: 'This was the period
when the rates of increase in industrial production were at a maximum
for the whole era to A.D. 1914';* and it was also a period in which 'real
wages rose for a rapidly expanding population'.3

(iii) The end of the eighteen-forties to A.D. 1873 : A war-period, gold-
mining period, and railway-building period.4

(iv) A.D. 1873-1900: A counterpart of Period (ii), with a tendency, in
investment, to concentrate on openings at home.5

(v) A.D. 1900-14: A counterpart of Period (iii), with a corresponding
spurt in gold-mining and a tendency to invest abroad in economically
virgin fields.6

It will be seen that the last four of these five phases of an average
wave-length of just under 25 years coalesce into a pair of still longer
cycles, one taking fifty-eight years (A.D. 1815-73) and an at least partially
repetitive successor taking forty-one years (A.D. 1873-1914) if the year
1914 is to be regarded as marking this second cycle's close.

A chronological pattern not unlike that descried by W. W. Rostow
in the history of Great Britain between the years A.D. 1790 and 1914
had been descried by A. Spiethoff in the contemporary history of the
Western World as a whole during the years A.D. 1822 to 1913 inclusive,
where the German investigator finds four phases of an average wave-
length of twenty-three years, articulated as follows :7
(i) A.D. 1822-42: on the whole, depressed,
(ii) A.D. 1843-73: on the whole, prosperous.

(iii) A.D. 1874-94: on the whole, depressed.

(iv) A.D. 1895-1913: on the whole, prosperous.

It will be noticed that in Spiethoif s geographically wider vista, as in
Rostow's geographically narrower one, there are four phases of an
average wave-length of not much less than a quarter of a century8 coales-
cing into a pair of longer cycles which, on SpiethofFs reckoning, take
respectively fifty-two years (A.D. 1822-73 inclusive) and forty years (A,D.
1874-1913 inclusive).

The pair of cycles of an average wave-length of about half a century,
which emerges from Spiethoff's and from Rostow's vista alike, repre-
sents a long-wave kind of cycle which was descried independently by a
couple of Dutch scholars—J, van Gelderen, who published his findings in
A.D. 1913, and G. de Wolff, who endorsed van Gelderen's findings in

i Ibid., p. 17. 2 Ibid., p. 17. * Ibid., p. 19.

* Ibid., pp. 20, 21, and 23. s Ibid., p. 25. 6 Ibid., p. 26.

7 As summarized in Habeler, G.: Prosperity and Depression: A Theoretical Analysis of
Cyclical Movements, 3rd ed. (Geneva 1941, League of Nations), p. 273. See also Schum-
pater, op. cit., vol. i, p. 164.

» A twenty-five-years cycle was descried by S. S. Kuznets as well (see Mitchell, ibid.,
p. 226, and S. S. Kuznets himself in his Secular Movements in Production and Prices
(New York and Boston 1930, Houghton Mifflin)).