“Ve are a giant in zwaddling cloths,” exclaimed Mordecai, the Jewish banker, who was one of the directors of the Great Midwestern. He said it solemnly at every directors’ meeting. Just so. Still, it was incomprehensible to people generally, and as the pain of loss, chagrin and disappointment unbearably increased the conglomerate mind performed the weird self-saving act of going mad. That is to say, people made a superstition of their economic sins and cast the blame for all their ills upon two objects,--gold and silver tokens. Thus what had been an economic crisis only, subject to repair, became a fiasco of intelligence. The Europeans, all gold people, who had bought enormous quantities of American stocks and bonds, said: “What now! These people are going crazy. They may refuse ever to pay us back in gold.” Whereupon they began hastily to sell American securities. “After all,” sighed the London Times, “the United States for all its great resources is a poor country.” In the panic of 1893 confidence was destroyed. People disbelieved in their own things, in themselves, in each other. Important banking institutions failed for scandalous reasons. Railroads went headlong into bankruptcy, until more than a billion dollars’ worth of bonds were in default, and in many cases the disclosures of inside speculation were most disgraceful. United States Senators were discovered speculating in the stock of corporations that were interested in tariff legislation, particularly the Sugar Trust. The name of Wall Street became accursed, not that morality was lower in Wall Street than anywhere else, but because the consequences of its sins were conspicuous. All industry sickened. A scourge of unemployment fell upon the land and labor as such, with no theory of its own about money, knowing only what it meant to be out of work, assailed the befuddled intelligence of the country with that embarrassing question: Why were men helplessly idle in this environment of boundless opportunity? The Coxeyites thought it was for want of money. So many people thought. They proposed that the government should raise money for extensive public works, thereby creating jobs for the workless, but the United States Treasury, which only a short time before contained a surplus so large that Congress had to invent ways of spending it, was now in desperate straits. The government’s income was not sufficient to pay its daily bills. However, neither the curse of unemployment nor the poverty of the United States Treasury was owing to a scarcity of money. The banks were overflowing with money,--idle money, which they were willing to lend at ½ of 1 per cent. just to get it out of their vaults. In one instance a bank offered to lend a large amount of money without interest. But nobody would borrow money. What should they do with it? There was no profit in business. So there was unemployment of both labor and capital. iv