And yet, without one unsound basic factor visible to superficial observers, we were suddenly plunged into a grave disaster--a panic which in actual money losses surpassed any of its predecessors. It came, this cataclysm (as the Stock Exchange had vainly predicted six months earlier), at the worst time it could possibly come, just when the banks were called upon to furnish $200,000,000 to transport and market the crops. Small wonder that in the face of such an optimistic outlook men stood aghast at the violence of the panic. As they had not understood the warning, so they could not understand its swift fulfilment. In all the long processions of panic-stricken people who stood in line at the banks in those trying days, not one in a hundred could understand how an institution could be solvent and yet be forced to suspend. Later on, smarting from losses, this bewilderment gave way to distrust and suspicion, as is often the case, humanly speaking, when men look elsewhere than to their own folly for the sources of their misfortunes. They were in a receptive mood when the charge was made that “Wall Street and the Stock Exchange” had brought about all this misery; they believed it to be true, and many still believe it. The charge was so widely circulated and was fraught with such possibilities of mischief that there was danger of ill-considered legislation directed against the Stock Exchange and supported by ill-advised public opinion. Thus it happened that Governor Hughes of New York, doubtless moved to forestall hasty law-making, appointed a committee to investigate the Stock Exchange. In another chapter we have reviewed the work of this commission; meantime, the words of its chairman are quoted, in passing, as a sort of _ex post facto_ reply to the outcry that “Wall Street did it.” “The immediate cause of the panic,” he says, “was a simultaneous rush to sell securities, by holders who perceived that there was trouble in the money market, and who wanted cash to meet maturing obligations. These holders were not Wall Street men merely, but people in all parts of the country who had invested some of their savings in stocks and bonds. The very _raison d’être_ of the Stock Exchange is to supply a market where invested capital can be quickly turned into cash, and vice versa. The remoter cause of the panic was a long course of speculation in all kinds of property, real and personal, that had pervaded all parts of the country, and many parts of the Old World, and had now reached its climax.” Mr. White here adds in a footnote that it has been “_shown conclusively that speculation on the Stock Exchange was not the chief contributor to the collapse of 1907, but that speculation on a much wider scale, through the length and breadth of the land, was the exciting cause_.”[64]