Mulhall, the English statistician, stated that the banking resources of the entire world in 1890, including the United States, were a little less than seventeen billion dollars ($17,000,000,000), and estimated that our banking resources at that time were a little less than seven billion dollars ($7,000,000,000), or about two-fifths of the total banking power of the world. Today our banking power exceeds twenty-five billion dollars ($25,000,000,000), while that of the entire world is estimated at about fifty-five billion dollars ($55,000,000,000). In other words, we now have more than 45 per cent of the total banking power of the world. Commercially speaking, the last fifty years has been the most marvelous period in the history of the human race, and the most surprising and most surpassing period of this most marvelous period are the years from 1890 to 1912. We now have more than twenty-five million toilers. Our productions in 1912 will exceed thirty-five billion dollars ($35,000,000,000). Our foreign trade will reach four billion dollars ($4,000,000,000). Our bank clearings will probably pass the one hundred and seventy billion dollar ($170,000,000,000) mark. Our total transactions (of all kinds) will approximate five hundred billion dollars ($500,000,000,000). Any business expressed in these stupendous figures, and involving every dollar of our capital, both the commercial and our vast investment funds, and every day's labor from ocean to ocean, and from Canada to the Gulf, ought to be commanding most serious attention on the part of every intelligent and patriotic man. This is more especially so when we look into the present situation, and discover upon what dangerous ground we stand, and how imminent a commercial explosion is, and that our very prosperity at the present time is our greatest peril. Indeed, that as our prosperity comes on apace, with equal certainty are we moving onward toward a commercial cataclysm. Since we have just passed a more or less critical stage, it may be well to call attention to the fact that any single, untoward incident of any great importance might have produced a business tragedy, even so soon after the commercial earthquake of 1907, which hardly left a single brick undisturbed in the edifice of the most prosperous time in the history of this or any other country. The national banks have been confined from the outset to a single kind or phase of banking, properly known as commercial banking. This was practically all there was in the way of banking in the United States in 1863, except the mutual savings banks, of which there are today six hundred and thirty in the whole country. It's a most remarkable fact that only thirty-one of these are west of Buffalo.