At first business improves slowly and surely. Then, as prices mount higher and higher, every producer increases his output, anxious to share in the general prosperity. Suddenly, just before the end, there is a boom. Prices rush madly upwards, until every prudent man sees that business has degenerated into a mere gamble, and that he must act quickly if he does not wish to be caught by the receding tide. Unless the banks are strong at that moment, disaster is inevitable; and as they had not taken the necessary precaution in 1847, the result was a crisis. Capital was cheap during the last quarter of 1844, the Bank rate remaining stationary at two-and-a-half per cent. from September of that year to October, 1845. Cheap money gives the promoter his opportunity; and in 1845 the railway mania was at its zenith. England was in the hands of the surveyor, and the "boom" began in real earnest. As usual, everybody was to become immensely rich, and, as usual, most people were again bitterly disappointed. By a strange process of reasoning, experience does not count in finance. Hope, after a very little while, drives out of the memory of human beings the nightmare of disaster; so, in an astonishingly short space of time, they are gambling again. The crisis of 1837 had lost all its significance by 1845; and then, of course, the Bank Act was to prevent commercial panics in the future! At the end of 1846 the Bank rate was raised to four per cent., and in October, 1847, it touched eight per cent. The speculation in railways naturally resulted in a gamble in iron; and, after the terrible famine in Ireland of 1846, when thousands died of fever and want in their wretched hovels and even on the roadsides, the suspension of the Corn Laws led to large importations of foreign grain. A sudden fall in prices immediately followed the increased supply, and the merchants in Mark Lane began to fail. Then people looked gravely at one another, and inquired what would happen next.