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that followed. Herbert Hoover seized on it immediately. “The fundamental business of the country,” the President intoned, “… is on a soundand prosperous basis.” These soothing phrases, together with the heavy investment by the bankers’ pool, helped to steady the market on Friday. But on Monday, October 28, prices resumed their tumble.
    In Canada, the bankers followed the cheerful lead of their American colleagues. The man in the street might be pardoned for believing that the bottom had been reached, especially when the general manager of the Royal Bank announced that “fundamental conditions are sound … and there is no room for pessimism.” But with the total value of shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange dropping at the rate of one million dollars a minute, the financial community could no longer put faith in its own press releases. The brokers worked far into the night sending out margin calls by phone and wire, warning their customers that they could not protect them past ten o’clock on Tuesday morning.
    In Toronto it was estimated that between five thousand and ten thousand margin calls went out that night. Early next morning people waited in queues at the brokerage houses, proffering cash and cheques, trying to hold on to their stock before the brokers sold them out. Prices were falling so fast that hundreds lost everything and still owed large sums.
    There was no longer any stock that could be called “blue chip.” When the Toronto exchange opened – it was not possible to close the doors on the dense crowd – it was discovered that the bluest of the blue, International Nickel and Brazilian Traction, had dropped ten and eleven points respectively overnight – erasing a total of $200 million from the market value of the two companies. Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, had begun.
    It was far more Stygian than Black Thursday. In Montreal early that morning, thousands besieged the brokerage offices – “packed not unlike sheep in a pen,” to quote one witness – and waited silently for the ticker to spell out their fate. The market had scarcely opened before the crash was apparent. As the tickers hummed and clicked and the prices were chalked on the big boards, the silence was eerie. People talked in whispers. Then, as the dimensions of the disaster sank in, some women began quietly to sob. In one Toronto brokerage office a man fainted. He was hastily laid out in a back room and left alone to recover as everybody rushed back to the stock board.
    Thursday’s chaotic scenes now appeared mild by comparison. Stocks did not rally briefly or follow an up-and-down sequence as they had the previous week. Prices plunged straight down as the big traders flung great blocks of shares onto the market – five thousand shares, ten thousand shares at a time. The word used most often to describe the pandemonium that day is “terror.” Suddenly, tens of thousands who had been seduced into seeing a bright future unhampered by debt or financial care could see nothing ahead but disaster.
    The stunned hush in the brokerage offices contrasted sharply with the terrifying sound, animal-like in its intensity, that burst once again from the stone walls of the Montreal exchange. It was not confined to the trading floor. On the street outside, men and women jostled and shouted while hundreds more forced their way into the corridors and the gallery.
    It was all but impossible to hear above the noise. Runners in blue and red blazers struggled through the mob on the floor, bringing scribbled instructions from brokerage houses to their men on the scene. Each trader would seize the piece of paper, then raise his voice in a hoarse cry, trying to sell something that nobody wanted to buy. So confused was the selling, so intense the sound, that traders standing within six feet of one another would often be screaming widely different prices for the same stock.
    Stocks were sacrificed at almost any price. Runners carrying completed