CHAPTER VI.
Why Lombard Street is Often Very Dull, and Sometimes Extremely Excited.
Any sudden event which creates a great demand for actual cash may cause, and will tend to cause, a panic in a country where cash is much economised, and where debts payable on demand are large.

In such a country an immense credit rests on a small cash reserve, and an unexpected and large diminution of that reserve may easily break up and shatter very much, if not the whole, of that credit.

Such accidental events are of the most various nature: a bad harvest, an apprehension of foreign invasion, the sudden failure of a great firm which everybody trusted, and many other similar events, have all caused a sudden demand for cash.

And some writers have endeavoured to classify panics according to the nature of the particular accidents producing them.

But little, however, is, I believe, to be gained by such classifications.