Summarized briefly, I have attempted to show in the foregoing pages that the Stock Exchange for many months prior to the panic had been steadily liquidating and contracting, and had served notice on the country at large that the time had come to put a stop to the prevalent over-expansion. It has been demonstrated that instead of heeding these warnings the general business of the country, as evidenced by the increases in loans and commercial discounts and by an over-speculation in real estate and in public and private extravagances, continued to expand up to the very eve of the panic, and was stopped then and there only by sheer lack of capital. Nothing can be of greater importance in any consideration of the 1907 crisis than that its overshadowing cause was the attempt to do too much business on too little capital, and compared with this all other aspects of that situation are of minor importance. I have shown that an antiquated currency system played a conspicuous part in the crisis, through contributory negligence on the part of our law-makers. The part played by the President has been cited as a third, though somewhat negligible, factor in sowing the seed of distrust, and also the trying position in which the great common carriers of the country found themselves after the seeds of distrust had been sown. These were the four causes of the panic of 1907.[76] How well the Stock Exchange did its work in that great emergency is a matter of record. It did not close its doors; there were no failures; no relaxation of the protection afforded the public; no departure from the high standard of morality which is ever its goal. In one week, ending October 25th, 5,166,560 shares passed through its hands, representing, with the transactions in bonds, a par valuation exceeding $483,000,000. Now, in the very nature of things, a financial panic is the inability of many debtors to meet their obligations, plus the fear that many others may be in the same plight. At such a time men hasten to sell for cash that for which there is the readiest market. Thus they sell securities because securities are immediately convertible; thus they turn to the Stock Exchange, because that is what Stock Exchanges are for. Hence it follows that in a crisis such as that of 1907 the ruinous decline manifests itself more sharply, and is felt more keenly, on the Stock Exchange than on the Cotton Exchange or the Produce Exchange. Men turn to it for first aid to the injured, and the greater the casualty list, the more marked is the disturbance of values. That this is not well understood by the public often unfortunately leads to suggestions of improper methods where none exist.