General business marked time while statesmen or pseudo-statesmen planned and promised panaceas. President Taft joined that populous group. The securities market, that barometer of business, fell beneath such assurance of further unsettlement. How can you continue to trade unless reasonably sure that conditions will remain fairly constant! All this militated against a normally quick recovery from a great panic. Little scares were frequently experienced. Influences matured and presented one great political party split into two great factions, while the other chief party endured something of the same development. A conservative handling of National policies, or a radical one was the question in each case. The November elections indicated a popular revolt against the party in power--the Republican. Unshaken, President Taft followed his convictions and in his Presidential message, of December, 1910, to Congress called for a halt in legislating to regulate corporations, until the effect of the laws on the statute books could be studied. The stock, money, and industrial markets were marking time. Not to go forward in business or elsewhere is in itself to retrograde. Thus opened the year 1911. Under the influence of easy money, better business on some of the western railroads, better dividend declarations here and there, a rosy "prediction as to the early future of the iron market, and the belief that the Interstate Commerce Commission would grant better rates to the railroads, general business felt encouraged and prices advanced somewhat. But in February the Interstate Commerce Commission forbade the railroads any increase whatever in rates. The roads were obliged to institute many cramping economies which to them very often meant the using up of their corpus and to the business world of the United States a permeating retrogressive influence. Reductions in railroad dividends were symptomatic of that. To add to all this there developed additional business unrest predicated in the general tariff change favored by the House of Representatives in April. The United States Supreme Court decision interpreting the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890 as affecting the Standard Oil Company case and the American Tobacco Company case were delivered late in May and were unexpectedly reassuring to business. This was another evidence that the best thought of the Nation everywhere was seeking to rectify the looseness of the past without killing business initiative and continued endeavor. So matters see-sawed in the business world. It was indeed in a state of unstable equilibrum. Stocks declined now abruptly; then, after some slight recovery, gently; but the slant was decidedly downward.