The sense of the passage seems to require ‘recession’ rather than ‘excessive’, the reading of the Ruskin Library Transcript T7A, and that also seems a better reading of the manuscript. A comma after ‘recess’ would be inappropriate, but the mark read as a comma seems deliberate. A possible explanation is that there is a full stop to mark an abbreviation after ‘recess’, and that both words are intended as ‘recession’.
[Version 0.05: May 2008]