Mr. John Burroughs warns us that it is one thing to treat your facts with imagination, but quite another thing to imagine your facts. Sufficient time has elapsed since 1907 to soften, somewhat, the bias and prejudice created by the events of that year, and perhaps there may be among us minds open to reason. The New York Stock Exchange feels, honestly, that a great injustice was done it by the criticism and abuse so generously poured out in the first shock of that event. Far from causing the crisis, its members assert that the institution fulfilled one of its most useful functions in giving ample warning of its approach, and that, when those warnings were disregarded, it concentrated all its machinery on the task of restoring order from chaos. They speak feelingly when they say that never in its history has the Stock Exchange been called upon to deal with so great an emergency, and never has it demonstrated so admirably its fundamental purposes. When they make these statements they offer to prove them. Let us examine the proofs. The panic of 1907 was not unlike many preceding financial disturbances. The opening months of the year had witnessed a general liquidation on the Stock Exchange, brought about naturally, and in simple, automatic compliance with economic laws and precedents. There had been over-expansion in all lines of business; careful students saw the portent; able men of power and influence heeded its warning and set corrective forces in motion months before the shock came. Total transactions in shares sold on the Stock Exchange had risen from 187 millions in 1904 to 284 millions in 1906, while the value of the securities thus sold increased from 12,061 to 23,393 millions of dollars respectively. This was too rapid growth, and the general liquidation that had been under way for months effectually corrected it, since New York City bank loans secured by Stock Exchange collateral declined, as shown by the Comptroller’s report, from $385,652,014 in August, 1905, to $251,867,158 in August, 1907--a corrective force represented by $133,784,856.