To have all these gifts crowned with sunshine and shower, free from pestilence and famine, we are the most prosperous and should be the best contented people on the earth.  In such a land there should be perpetual peace and plentiful prosperity.  Yet we have hard times after hard times, and panic after panic.  Why is this?  If I could tell you why, it would repay for the time and money spent to hear this lecture.  During the great panic in the nineties Mr. W.C.  Whitney of New York, wrote a letter to a leading New York daily in which he said:  “There are just two causes for this panic; too much silver and too much tariff.”  I do not disparage these two problems, but I do say Mr. Whitney had a very narrow view of a panic.  Like many another man, he had a thorough knowledge of certain things and was totally ignorant of others.

A Chief Justice of the United States was riding in a carriage with his family when a shaft broke.  It was not broken short off, but shivered by contact with a post.  The Chief Justice had no strings and was in a dilemma.  A negro boy passed by, dressed in rags, whistling a merry tune.  The great jurist hailed the boy, saying, “Boy, have you a string?”

“No, boss, what’s de matter?”

“I have broken the shaft of my carriage,” said the Justice.

“Yas, sir, I guess you is, boss.  Is you got a knife?  If you is, I think I can fix it for you.”

Taking the knife, he jumped the fence and cut withes from a sapling, with which he lashed a lath to the shaft.

“I guess da’ll git you home, boss.”

“That’s a good job,” said the Judge; “why didn’t I think of that?”

The boy replied:  “I don’t know, sir, ’cept some folks know more than others.”

That boy did know more than the Chief Justice of the United States about mending a broken shaft.  I think I know a thing or two about panics which Mr. Whitney did not seem to have learned.  Let me give you two causes for panics.  They are not all but they rank with Mr. Whitney’s.

First, the extravagance of the people.  When times are good and money plentiful, people are extravagant.  They buy everything and pay enormous prices.  A horse, Axtell, brings his owner one hundred and five thousand dollars; a two-year-old colt, Arion, one hundred and twenty-five thousand.  A town site is located in a barren waste and lots sell at ten to one hundred dollars a front foot.  All kinds of wildcat schemes are promoted, and the people bite at the bait.  An era of extravagance is on and “sight unseen” investments are made.  Several years ago my brother said to me:  “Are you going West soon, as far as Kansas City?” When I replied that I was he said:  “I have never been in that city but I have two lots there I wish you would look at and ascertain their value.”  He advised me to call on a certain real estate agent, who would show me the lots.  When I called on the agent a little while later, he informed me the lots could not be seen until a dry spell took off the water.  Two lots my brother never saw and never sold; decidedly “watered stock.”