As the summer of 1907 advanced, speculation throughout the country continued in rapidly increasing volume, while on the Stock Exchange there was an almost complete cessation of activity. Business men of the West and South seemed to feel that as there had been no serious failures, and as the decline in the stock market had restored values to an attractively low basis, there would be a normal recovery similar to that which followed the panic of 1893. They felt that the trouble, whatever it was, had now been corrected, and in this fancied security they went about with further expansion of their business enterprises, confident that no serious difficulties were in store. The Stock Exchange was often cynically referred to in that period as “the only blue spot on the map.” Its members were cheerfully invited by a Western newspaper to “shake off their torpor and join the Sunshine movement.” It is only fair to say that there was some force in the buoyant if superficial viewpoint of the country at large, for in the autumn of 1907 we were blessed with all the kindly fruits of the earth in abundance. The average crop of our agricultural products gathered that year was enormous, and behind it lay large reserves of wealth that had accumulated from a series of good crops in the years just preceding. There was, moreover, a partial failure of foreign crops that brought about heavy foreign requirements, thus assuring rich returns to American producers. Our railroads, which in the previous panic of 1893 were so affected by declining traffic and by the unproductiveness of new territory into which they had ventured that bankruptcies became general, were early in 1907 in better physical condition than ever before. Their gross earnings were at a maximum; their surpluses fat with the profits of recent years; their credit high. A long accumulation of foreign-trade balances had made the inherent strength of the nation greater than ever before. Finally there was the great essential difference between 1907 and former years in that we were now, by statute law as well as in fact, on a gold-standard basis.