The details of the panic of 1907 are still fresh in mind, and need be but briefly referred to. Banks and trust companies closed their doors and suspended payments to depositors. Cash and credit became almost unobtainable; we were face to face with demoralization. Clearing-house certificates were resorted to at practically all banking centres throughout the country; there was a general requirement of time notices for withdrawal of savings bank deposits; all normal credit instruments were impaired. The Secretary of the Treasury was forced to exercise heroic discretion in the matter of security for government deposits and for the very necessary increase of a note circulation that was then suffering from a spasm of contraction. There was an immense hoarding of funds and a consequent drying up of fluid capital, while from one end of the country to the other, there was liquidation, business contraction, retrenchment, panic, and ruin. “Wall Street” and the Stock Exchange had foreseen that the chain was only as strong as its weakest link, and had done what it could to prepare the public for the break. To assert at this late day that it did aught but its full duty is humbug _in excelsis_. I have already cited one instance, the country’s expanding bank loans as contrasted with “Wall Street’s” contraction, to show how plainly the warning was conveyed. As another instance, take the immobilization of capital tied up in the enormous real-estate speculation then prevalent. In New York City alone the increase in mortgages recorded jumped from 455 millions in 1904 to 755 millions in 1905, an increase over the previous years of 32.7 per cent, and 66 per cent, respectively.[68] The figures showing the increase in building permits are similarly significant, revealing the fact that in 1905, 1906, and the early months of 1907, money was pouring into new construction at a rate without precedent. In Greater New York alone, not including Queens County, building permits granted in 1904 amounted to $153,300,000, and in 1905 to $229,500,000, and in the face of disaster this rate of increase continued up to the very eve of the panic.[69] Outside of New York the expansion in building operations was equally rapid and equally ominous, showing an _increase_ in twenty-five cities alone from $201,300,000 in 1903 to $234,200,000 in 1904, to $280,400,000 in 1905 and to $307,800,000 in 1906--all this but a small part of the actual funds thus locked up throughout the whole country.[70] We thus find that one of the most important and inevitable causes of the panic was the absorption of exceptionally large amounts of capital in enterprises that required a considerable time for completion, or which, when completed, were not immediately profitable; and to them may be added factories and extensive public and private works of every kind. This form of expansion, as Senator Burton points out, when carried to extremes almost invariably brings about a disturbance.