Outside those who are actually engaged in a financial panic--such as brokers, bankers, merchants and manufacturers, who have loans to pay or receive, or acceptances falling due, and who are therefore too busy and too sorely beset to moralize on it or look at it objectively, as the philosophers say--there is a large body of persons who are not immediately affected by it, such as professional men, owners of secure investments, persons in receipt of well-assured salaries, ministers, newspaper writers, speculative economists, financiers, and farmers, to whom it is a source of secret enjoyment. They are obliged, out of sympathy with their neighbors, to look blue, and probably few of them are entirely exempt from the general anxiety about the future, but, nevertheless, they are on the whole rather gratified than otherwise by the thing's having happened. In the first place, all those persons who give their attention to the currency question are divided into two great schools--the paper men and the hard-money men; and every panic affords each of them what it considers a legitimate ground of triumph. The paper men say that the crisis is due to failure to issue more paper at the proper moment, and the hard-money men ascribe it to the irredeemability of what is already issued; and each side chuckles over the convulsion as a startling confirmation of its views, and goes about calling attention to it almost gleefully. There is a similar division on the banking question. Indeed the feud between the friends of free banking and restricted banking is fiercer than that between the two currency schools, and has raged longer, and every monetary crisis feeds the flame. It is maintained, on the one hand, that if banks were let alone by the state their issues would be proportioned to the exact wants of business; and, on the other, that if the state would only restrict them more rigidly business would be kept within proper limits, and all would go well. Each disputant draws from a panic about the same amount of support for his views, because in the great variety of circumstances which surround it there are always some which favor any theory of its origin. In one thing, however, both sets of observers are apt to agree thoroughly, and that is in believing the "thing will not blow over," and that "we are going to feel it for a long time." They have long foreseen it, and have only been surprised that it did not come sooner; and they lower their voices to a hoarse whisper while telling you this.