How persistently the power of the executive was used, and how carefully the offices were dispensed, to influence Senators and members of Congress against the Sherman law, were matters of ordinary comment at the time. Meanwhile the banks were putting in motion their peculiar and enormous persuasions. For months no man could go into any bank in any State of the Union for any purpose without having thrust under his nose, with a more or less pointed request for his signature, a petition demanding the repeal of the obnoxious statute. Then, in the latter days of April, 1893, on the stock exchange, there began that concerted onslaught upon stocks and values, vaunted as an "object-lesson" to the people, as a result of which within eight months six hundred of the relatively smaller banking institutions of the country went down, dragging with them fifteen thousand industrial and business enterprises, involving a total loss of seven hundred and fifty millions of dollars. The object-lesson served its purpose. With the business world shattered into fragments, enterprise stifled, and credit dead, a terror seized upon the people. The opportunity for which the big bankers had been coolly waiting had come. Cunningly and in many places at once they started the cry that the Sherman law had caused all this havoc, and that the only hope for a return of prosperity lay in the immediate repeal of the feature providing for the purchase of new silver bullion. The clamor was eagerly repeated, and fear eagerly believed it. At precisely the right moment the President himself made official proclamation that the rumor was true, and summoned Congress in extra session to obey the mandate of the bankers. Under this spell Congress acted and the law was repealed. Thus was the country made dependent upon gold alone for its new supplies of full-power money, and thus, aided by similar action elsewhere, was inaugurated an era of accelerated fall of prices more pronounced than the world has known since the middle ages, and a precipitate decline of values more ruinous than any other chronicled in history.