Railroads are public utilities that must continue to handle business offered them no matter what happens, and so, to meet all these abnormal demands, but one course was left open to them, and that was to raise funds by issues of new stock. This, of course, amounted practically to an assessment of stockholders; as an expedient it failed because “Wall Street” had already recognized the symptoms of disease. It was too late. Money and credit attract money and credit, and confidence attracts both. There was a shocking absence of confidence in the emergency of 1907, and the railroads suffered enormously by it. With this matter certainly Wall Street had nothing to do; it could not in fact do more than it had just done in pointing out to the country at large, through a drastic process of liquidation, the obvious withdrawal of far-sighted investors from a situation that had become tense. Nor can the railroads be censured, because the great volume of business that confronted them was not created by them, and yet had to be transported by them. The fault lay, of course, in the wholesale and reckless expansion of all lines of industry, and in the immensely increased extravagance of public and private life. I venture the prediction that when these conditions again prevail, as they must in a great and vigorous country like ours, the Stock Exchange will still be found sounding its warnings, but it will not do to hope that those who learned the bitter lesson of 1907 will profit by that experience, because the condition of _mental_ disturbance which is a part of every panic cannot be regulated by the will, nor kept within bounds by the statute law. The one lesson we have learned from the predicament of the railroads in 1907 is that there is a tendency toward disturbance in large accessions either of business or of capital. “At intervals,” says Walter Bagehot, “the blind capital of a country is particularly large and craving; it seeks for some one to devour it, and there is ‘plethora’; it finds some one, and there is ‘speculation’; it is devoured, and there is ‘panic.’”[75]