But now, after a few months of inactivity, which holders of speculative securities had spoken of as another healthy breathing spell, the tendency of prices had changed.  Had not merely halted, but showed a radical tendency to shrink; even to tumble feverishly.  Buyers were scarce, and the once accommodating banks displayed a heartless disposition to scrutinize collateral and to ask embarrassing questions in regard to commercial paper.  Rates of interest on loans were ruthlessly advanced, and additional security demanded.  A pall of dejection hung over Benham.  Evil days had come; days the fruit of a long period of inflation.  A dozen leading firms failed and carried down with them diverse small people.  Amid the general distrust and anxiety all eyes were fixed on Wall street, the so-called money centre of the country, the Gehenna where this cyclone had first manifested itself.  The newspapers, voicing Benham public opinion, cast vituperation at the bankers and brokers of Wall street, whose unholy jugglings with fortune had brought this commercial blight on the community.  Wall street had locked up money; consequently funds were tight in Benham, and the plans of its honest burghers to promote enterprise and develop the lawful industries of the country were interrupted.  So spoke public opinion, and, at the same time, hundreds of private letters were being despatched through the Benham Post Office in response to requests for more margins on stocks held for the honest burghers by the fraternity of Wall street gamblers.  There was private wailing and gnashing of teeth also, for in the panic a few of these bankers and brokers had been submerged, and the collateral of Benham’s leading citizens had been swept away.

The panic itself was brief as panics always are, but it left behind it everywhere a paralyzed community.  So far as Benham was concerned, only a few actually failed, but, in a host of instances, possessors of property who had thought themselves wealthy a year before found that they were face to face with the knotty problem of nursing their dwarfed resources so as to avoid eventual insolvency.  Everything had shrunk fifty—­often one hundred—­per cent., for the basis of Benham’s semi-fabulous development had been borrowed money.  Many of Benham’s leading citizens were down to hard pan, so to speak.  Their inchoate enterprises were being carried by the banks on the smallest margins consistent with the solvency of those institutions, and clear-headed men knew that months of recuperation must elapse before speculative properties would show life again.  Benham was consequently gloomy for once in despite of its native buoyancy.  It would have arisen from the ashes of a fire as strenuous as a young lion.  But, with everybody’s stocks and merchandise pledged to the money lenders, enterprise was gripped by the throat.  In the pride of its prosperity Benham had dreamed that it was a law unto itself, and that even Wall street could not affect its rosy commercial destinies.  It appeared to pious owners of securities almost as though God had deserted his chosen city of a chosen country.