e shining light, died at midnight--a beautiful, peaceful
death, they say, with his daughter reading the Bible aloud, and his lips
moving in prayer. Some hold that, had he lived, the tranquillity would have
continued; but this is the view of those who can not realize that the tide
of affairs is no more controlled by the "great men" than is the river led
down to the sea by its surface flotsam, by which we measure the speed and
direction of its current. Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow
seemed a calm, something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where
Roebuck stood guard, it must have yielded somewhere else, or might have
gone all in one grand crash.

Monday. You know the story of the artist and his Statue of Grief--how
he molded the features a hundred times, always failing, always getting
an anti-climax, until at last in despair he gave up the impossible and
finished the statue with a veil over the face. I have tried again and again
to assemble words that would give some not too inadequate impression of
that tremendous week in which, with a succession of explosions, each like
the crack of doom, the financial structure that housed eighty millions of
people burst, collapsed, was engulfed. I can not. I must leave it to your
memory or your imagination.

For years the financial leaders, crazed by the excess of power which the
people had in ignorance and over-confidence and slovenly good-nature
permitted them to acquire, had been tearing out the honest foundations on
which alone so vast a structure can hope to rest solid and secure. They
had been substituting rotten beams painted to look like stone and iron.
The crash had to come; the sooner, the better--when a thing is wrong, each
day's delay compounds the cost of righting it. So, with all the horrors of
"Wild Week" in mind, all its physical and mental suffering, all its ruin
and rioting and bloodshed, I still can insist that I am justly proud of my
share in bringing it about. The blame and the shame are wholly upon those
who made "Wild Week" necessary and inevitable.

In catastrophes, the cry is "Each for himself!" But in a cataclysm, the
obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, "Stand together,
for, singly, we perish." This was a cataclysm. No one could save himself,
except the few who, taking my often-urged advice and following my example,
had entered the ark of ready money. Farmer and artisan and professional man
and laborer owed me