The Hopeful Qutlook 259
Financial Crises and Periods of Industrial and
Commercial Depression (1902), Theodore E.
Burton says:
“ . . A more important problem is the explanation
 of the conceded fact that during crises and
periods of depression, the aggregate wealth of the
communities affected does not give indication of such
decrease as would be expected, and that those countries
 which seem to suffer most from these disturbances
 show, from decade to decade, the greatest
increase in wealth and material prosperity.”
[f ever these words were applicable, they are
singularly applicable to this situation. President
Hoover, ex-President Coolidge, and Secretary Mellon
 have been excoriated for prompting the investing
 public to too great optimism concerning our
prosperity. They have been accused of making
political capital of it, just as Chairman Raskob of
the Democratic National Committee was accused of
making political capital of it at the Houston convention
 while the bull movement was being called
the “Smith Boom.” But it was not a factitious
boom, the figment of political imaginings. On the
studies of the remarkable rise in earnings of corporations
 during the bull movement, as presented
in this book, I would venture the opinion that
between two-thirds and three-fourths of the rise in
the stock market between 1926 and September, 1929,
was justified.
There was a remainder which was not justified.
Its unjustified character is best betokened by the