Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered a depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 until 1879, and even longer in some countries (France and Britain). In Britain, for example, it started two decades of stagnation known as the "Long Depression" that weakened the country's economic leadership. . . . American post-Civil War inflation, rampant speculative investments (overwhelmingly in railroads), the demonetization of silver in Germany and the United States, ripples from economic dislocation in Europe resulting from the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), property losses in the Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872) fires, and other factors put a massive strain on bank reserves, which plummeted in New York City in September and October 1873 from $50 million to $17 million. The first symptoms of the crisis were financial failures in the Austro-Hungarian capital, Vienna, which spread to most of Europe and North America by 1873." [Wikipedia] "A new era of history, political as well as economic, opens with the depression of the 1870s. . . . It undermined or destroyed the foundations of mid-nineteenth-century liberalism which appeared to have been so firmly established."