The panic that hit the Paris Bourse in October, 1912, causing a disturbance not equaled in violence since 1870, was brought about by sowing the wind through an immense public speculation based on two fine harvests in Russia and a feverish revival of commercial and industrial activity all over Europe. Up to this point all the indicia of the movement--such as bank loans, building operations, public and private extravagance, and a blind infatuation for speculation by a normally prudent nation that had not speculated on a large scale since the Panama débacle of 1894--corresponds exactly with conditions in America just preceding the 1907 crisis. The similarity between the two incidents goes even farther, for early in September of 1912 the French bankers and _Agents de Change_, recognizing the strained condition of credit, had deliberately put in motion corrective agencies designed to stop the rise with the least possible derangement of confidence. They would have succeeded, no doubt, and the situation would have exactly paralleled our own discounting processes of March, 1907, but for the unforeseen Balkan difficulty which, coming out of a clear sky, upset the plans of the conservative financial forces and precipitated a panic. It came, as a French banker explained, a week too soon--by which he meant that, given a little more time, the worst phases of the disturbance would have been avoided through gradual and orderly liquidation. As it stands, the panic will no doubt go down into French financial history as “the Balkan panic,” just as our disturbance of 1907 is ascribed, _faute de mieux_, to Wall Street wickedness; but in reality both the French and American crises had their origin in precisely similar causes. The Balkan news in Paris only precipitated what the French Bourse had planned to accomplish in an orderly manner, just as Wall Street and the Stock Exchange had done five years earlier in a similar emergency. The essential lesson of both instances is that the same causes which generate prosperity will, if pushed far, generate an equivalent adversity.