It was impossible to do much toward limiting the secondary effects of the crash during the next few days. The fears of all classes of investors had been fully roused. The ordinary laws of trade seemed to have been suspended. A kind of commercial anarchy was in the air. All markets were unsettled, and everybody was apprehensive of all manner of disaster. For several days, Wharton and Brent strove by every resource and expedient that their combined wits could suggest to hold the storm in check. They bought in some markets, they sold in others, they borrowed money, they loaned it, according as the rapidly changing exigencies of the situation seemed to dictate. They succeeded in completely confusing and demoralizing even the wisest and most conservative financial leaders. The men whose judgment and action are the best reliance in great crises were as much in the dark as the most bumptious charlatan of finance. But after a few days things began to quiet down a little. It was not the calm of returning confidence, however. The partial suspension of activity was merely the paralysis of doubt and fear, and as ominous almost as the rampant fever which had preceded it. The situation was complicated by the culmination of long gathering protests in the industrial world. Great strikes upon the principal railways and in cotton, woolen, and other manufacturing establishments were not only threatened, but in some cases actually begun. Mill-owners had been on the point of yielding to their operatives’ demands, but the panic in prices for two weeks had affected their products seriously. They realized that their market, like nearly all others, was overstocked. Instead of running their mills overtime as they had been doing to supply what was really an investors’ and not a consumers’ demand, they suddenly faced the necessity of cutting down production, if not closing their mills entirely. The operatives had pressed their demand too late. They were again to become the victims of the suddenly changed conditions. Before the crisis, they were in the hard situation of having plenty of work at nominally fair wages, but really at wages possessing only sixty per cent of the purchasing power of the same number of dollars and cents six months before. Now that they had finally rebelled against this injustice, the conditions had suddenly changed. Prices of the necessaries of life had fallen, but before the wage-earners could take advantage of the return to old conditions, their demands for more money were met by the announcement that there would soon be no work at any price. What wonder that discontent and rebellion were rampant among all classes?