And it was still less possible to sell shares, for shares, even sound shares, had on a sudden become waste paper. The bubble companies, created during the frenzy of the past two years, were bursting on every side, and the public, unable to discriminate, no longer put faith in anything. Rudely awakened, they opened their eyes to reality. They saw that they had dreamed, and been helped to dream. They discovered that skates and warming pans were in no great request in the tropics, and could not be exported thither at a profit of five hundred per cent. They saw that churns and milkmaids, freighted to lands where the cattle ran wild on the pampas and oil was preferred to butter, were no certain basis on which to build a fortune. Their visions of South American argosies melted into thin air. The silver from La Plata which they had pictured as entering the mouth of the Thames, or at worst as within sight from the Lizard, was discovered to be reposing in the darkness of unopened seams. The pearling ships were yet to build, the divers to teach, and, for the diamonds of the Brazils which this man or that man had seen lying in skin packages at the door of the Bank of England, they now twinkled in a cold and distant heaven, as unapproachable as the Seven Stars of Orion. The canals existed on paper, the railways were in the air, the harbors could not be found even on the map. The shares of companies which had passed from hand to hand at fourfold and tenfold their face value fell with appalling rapidity. They fell and fell until they were in many cases worth no more than the paper on which they were printed. And the bursting of these shams, which had never owned the smallest chance of success, brought about the fall of ventures better founded. The good suffered with the bad. Presently no man would buy a share, no man would look at a share, no bank advance on its security. Men saw their fortunes melt day by day as snow melts under an April sun. They saw themselves stripped, within a few weeks or even days, of wealth, of a competence, in too many cases of their all. And the ruin was widespread. It reached many a man who had never gambled or speculated. Business runs on the wheels of credit, and those wheels are connected by a million unseen cogs. Let one wheel stop and it is impossible to say where the stoppage will cease, or how many will be affected by it. So it was now. The honest tradesman and the manufacturer, striving to leave a competence to a family nurtured in comfort, were involved in one common ruin with the spendthrift and the speculator. The credit of all was suspect; from all alike the sources of accommodation were cut off. Each in his turn involved his neighbor, and brought him down.