The Hopeful Qutlook 259 
Financial Crises and Periods of Industrial and 
Commercial Depression (1902), Theodore E. 
Burton says: 
“ . . A more important problem is the expla- 
nation 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 coun- 
tries which seem to suffer most from these disturb- 
ances 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 Mel- 
lon have been excoriated for prompting the invest- 
ing 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 con- 
vention 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 cor- 
porations 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