structures, like the shock of some gigantic earthquake.

Everybody is of course struck by these phenomena, and everybody has
his own way of accounting for them; it will not, therefore, appear
presumptuous in us to offer a word on the common theme. Let it be
premised, however, that we do not undertake a scientific solution of
the problem, but only a suggestion or two as to what the problem itself
really is. In a difficult or complicated case, a great deal is often
accomplished when the terms of it are clearly stated.

It is not enough, in considering the effects before us, to say that
they are the results of a panic. No doubt there has been a panic, a
contagious consternation, spreading itself over the commercial world,
and strewing the earth with innumerable wrecks of fortune; but that
accounts for nothing, and simply describes a symptom. What is the cause
of the panic itself? These daring Yankees, who are in the habit of
braving the wildest tempests on every sea, these sturdy English, who
march into the mouths of devouring cannon without a throb, these gallant
Frenchmen, who laugh as they scale the Malakoff in the midst of belching
fires, are not the men to run like sheep before an imaginary terror.
When a whole nation of such drop their arms and scatter panic-stricken,
there must be something behind the panic; there must be something
formidable in it, some real and present danger threatening a very
positive evil, and not a mere sympathetic and groundless alarm.

Neither do we conceive it as sufficiently expressing or explaining the
whole facts of the case, to say that the currency has been deranged.
There has been unquestionably a great derangement of the currency; but
this may have been an effect rather than a cause of the more general
disturbance; or, again, it may have been only one cause out of many