The Week [excerpt]

     The prompt recovery on the Stock Exchange on Monday morning was hardly needed as evidence that the feeling of panicky apprehension which immediately followed the attack on President McKinley and the news that he could not survive, had no basis in sound judgment of the general situation. It was inevitable that an event which so profoundly shocked the entire civilized world should shake also the security and money markets. Part of the function of these markets, indeed, is to express in tangible shape, with matters of this sort, the sentiment of the hour. Precisely, therefore, as last Friday’s excited drop in prices reflected the dismay with which the news from Buffalo was received, so the rise on Monday was in a way the voice of public confidence and reassurance. There was all along, in fact, as little warrant for the free-handed predictions of “money-market panic” as there would have been for predictions that the American people generally would break out into the lynching of anarchists, or into wild and senseless fright over the country’s future. Its own problems the money market still has to meet, and it will meet them as they arise. But these are quite independent of such a collapse and recovery as have followed the incidents of the few past days.