Foreigners are prone to speak of Yankee speculation as foolhardy and reckless, as no doubt it is at times, but never in American history has there been a panic with anything like the severe declines, in so brief a period, as those just recorded. For that matter, we in America have never experienced a boom in any sense commensurate with London’s rubber boom of 1909–10, nor a collapse as sudden and as thoroughly deserved as that which followed it. Again, London’s Kaffir Circus of 1894–5, and the furious speculation in Panama shares in Paris in the early nineties, have had no parallel in American stock markets. This is only another way of saying that the speculative mania which seizes upon nations at periodic intervals is not a matter of latitude and longitude in any sense.[112] In trying to picture what would happen in the London Stock market should such a war as that which Englishmen are always discussing really occur, we must take into account not only the mass of securities that would be directly affected, but also the great burden borne by London banks and bankers in security issues all over the world. On another page we have seen that London’s capital expenditures on new issues in various quarters of the globe in a single year exceeded £267,000,000; in the quarter just closed (September, 1912), these disbursements ran £25,000,000 above the previous year. That they will continue so to increase is open to no doubt as long as England’s abstention from war is assured; but if there should arise even the possibility of war, it would result in an embarrassment of credit with terribly serious results, such as have never been dreamed of in the world’s history. The many years of peace between the great powers, the many new countries that have been opened to commercial development, and the countless new fields of industrial endeavor that have come into being while this peace has lasted, have served to create a British credit situation huge and complicated beyond all precedent. Any serious interruption or derangement of so vast a system would find a very different situation from that which existed on the Continent in 1870. It would be appalling.