When a man is in this state of mind, the best thing he can do is to delay his final decisions until he has really thought matters out.  If he does this, the actual facts of the case may, on reflection, prove far less serious than the impulsive and diseased mind has supposed.

But it must follow that a man who can only trust his judgment to operate after a period of time must be in the second class, compared with the formed judgment which can flash into sane action in a moment.  He must always be a day behind the fair—­a quality fatal to real success.

How can the victim exorcise from his mind this dread of the unknown—­this partly conscious and partly subconscious form of fear, “which eats the heart alway”?  Nothing can throw off the grip which this acute anxiety has fixed on the brain, except a resolute effort of will and intelligence.  I, myself, would give one simple recipe for the cure.  When you feel inclined to be anxious about the present, think of the worst anxiety you ever had in the past.  Instead of one grip on the mind, there will be two distinct grips—­and the greater grip of the past will overpower the lesser one in the present.  “Nothing,” a man will say, “can be as bad as that crisis of old, and yet I survived it successfully.  If I went through that and survived, how far less arduous and dangerous is the situation to-day?” A man can thus reason and will himself into the possession of a stout heart.

If a man can still the panic of his own heart, he will need to fear very little all the storms which may rage against him from outside.  “It is the nature of tense spirits,” says Lord Rosebery, “to be unduly elated and unduly depressed.”  A man who can conquer these extremes and turn them into common level of effort is the man who will be master in the sphere of his own soul, and, therefore, capable of controlling the vast currents which flow from outside.  He may rise to that height of calmness once exhibited by Lord Leverhulme, who, when threatened with panic in his business, remarked, “Yes, of course, if the skies fall, all the larks will be killed.”

Panic, therefore, whether external or internal, is an experience which tests at once the body, the mind, and the soul.  The internal panic is an evil which can only be cured by a resolute application of the will and intellect to the subconscious self.  The panic of a world suddenly convulsed in its markets is like a thunderstorm, sweeping from the mountains down the course of a river to where some town looks out on the bay.  It comes in a moment from the wild, and passes as swiftly into the sea.  It has the evanescence of a dream and yet all the force of reality.  It consists of air and rain, and yet the lighter substance, driven with the force of a panic passion, can uproot the solid materials, as the tornado the tall trees and the stone dwellings of humanity, and turn the secular lives of men into desolation and despair.  When it has passed, all seems calm, and only the human wreckage remains to show the power of the storm that has swept by.