Finally, where do we stand? Orthodox economists like Wells talk of over-production as a cause of panics; currency experts bewail a lack of circulating media; theorists of the school of Jevons are driven to seek in sun-spots the potent force of all our harvests; Levi and Mill dwell upon the periodicity of panics and would fix their appearance by schedules of time; politicians and thinkers-in-embryo point the finger at Wall Street, and yet, with all that has been written, thirteen great crises at home and abroad within the last century show that we have not begun to get at these disturbances. Drought has been a cause of mischief, yet we have learned to irrigate and to conserve; epidemics have smitten us, yet we have mastered sanitation; floods have ruined whole territories, yet we have built dikes and levees. But every now and then, when business seems to be at its best, when merchants are dividing large profits, and when labor is best rewarded, a panic occurs and the whole structure collapses. To say that Wall Street or Lombard Street or any group of men anywhere can bring such conditions to pass is to deny all the facts of experience. Depressions may come from any of a hundred causes, but panics originate in the mind; they are manias. Walter Bagehot gave up trying to prescribe for them because he realized that sudden frenzy is not an ailment to be foreseen and prevented. “But one thing is certain,” he said, “that at particular times a great many stupid people have a great deal of stupid money;” to which he adds, “our scheme is not to allow any man to have a hundred pounds who cannot prove to the Lord Chancellor that he knows what to do with a hundred pounds.” When thousands of people ignore all the warnings of experience, as they always will do; when with a blind misdirection of energy they sink borrowed capital in quagmires at fancy prices, as they always have done; and when, shorn of their all, they are simultaneously seized with a mania to denounce others for the consequences of their own folly, as they always must do, one cannot avoid the thought that perhaps Bagehot’s humorous solution is the best that has been devised.[77] CHAPTER VII A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEGISLATIVE ATTEMPTS TO RESTRAIN OR SUPPRESS SPECULATION