ABSTRACT
The whole industrial growth of Austria had so concentrated itself in companies, credit establishments, banks, and similar institutions, represented by shares in the Stock Exchange, \Vhicb were dealt in and settled for day by day, that the gt·eat crisis which began in Vienna. on Ma.y lOth took at first exclusively the form of a. Stock Exchange panic, auch as might be, and lately was, brought about at the same centre by a. war scare. It was even supposed that this might be the beginning a.nd the end of it. That the prices of shares in such companies had been run up fa.r too high by the declaration of fict-itious dividends, by assiduous puffing in the parasite press, and by the usual trickery resorted to to keep stocks above their real value, was freely admitted by some German financiers, not a. few of whom regarded the commencement of this, as it proved, overwhelming crisis as only a natural and wholesome shrinkage of the price of shares to reasonable dimensions. Tl1ey were soon undeceived as to the magnitude of the calamity which bad befallen the whole of Central Europe and the countries with which their recent operations had brought them most directly into contact. Even the
