of best protecting the individual American without impairing his freedom of thought and action and his right to the proceeds of his labor. There should be clearer thinking, less blind hostility to wealth, whether in individual or corporate form, and absolute definitions of what is sought by new measures, whether simply protection for the investor or the consumer or the destruction of industries and property. Those who are not impelled by the latter purpose should take care not to be made cat's-paws by those who are.

If momentary prejudice and desire for political capital are excluded from consideration, it is at least questionable whether the time is ripe for new legislation of a drastic character in regard to corporations. It is apparent that important interests are timorous as to the effects of such legislation upon business and investments. Whether they are right or wrong in this timidity, it may fairly be said that the burden of proof in favor of any specific Federal law should be put upon those who advocate it.

Business interests should not stand in the way of the national life or well-being. Where a clear need exists for legislation which is injurious or dangerous to them, those interests must give way. Their willingness to submit to such a sacrifice has been shown on many occasions. To name but one, in 1861 the associated banks of New York willingly came to the aid of the Government when a public loan could not well be floated and acceded to the demand that they should pay the instalments of their temporary loan into the Sub-treasury in coin instead of by the usual methods of transferring credit, although they well knew and emphatically declared that in submitting to this illadvised demand of Secretary Chase, they were impairing their coin reserves and inviting the suspension of specie payments with its Pandora's box of evils.

If a similar necessity exists to-day for Federal legislation inimical to business interests, those interests should give way; but if there is no such clear necessity, and if the remedies for supposed evils are in

choate and their results are dubious, it is not apparent why legislation should be insisted upon pending careful consideration of the entire subject in all its bearings, economic, political, and financial, including observation of like experiments in other countries. When ills assail the State, her best citizens are bound to seek for remedies; but when such remedies are proposed, the burden should lie upon their proposers to prove that they are real remedies and not quack ones. the absence of a great and present menace to the national life, they should be adopted only after they have been carefully weighed by sane and temperate men and their benefits in their minds clearly and greatly outweigh the risks of change.

In

It is delicate work to experiment with industry. Business men and financiers are trained through life for such work. They must by the nature of their occupation make experiments and take the consequences of their blunders and their discoveries. It is doubtful if Government officials can make these experiments more

skilfully. If tempted to use their great powers rashly, without fully weighing the consequences, they should reflect that

"It is excellent

To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant,”

par

when by so doing they may arrest the wheels of industry, spread terror and alysis through the world of trade and above all stifle and pervert that fine spirit of foresight, initiative, and intelligent daring which are the distinguishing traits of the American man of business, and have made possible the imperial progress of our country during more than a century of internal industrial freedom.

III

THE FUNCTION OF THE STOCK AND PRODUCE

EXCHANGES

ONE of the most persistent of the hallucinations which prevail among people otherwise apparently lucid and well informed is the conception that operations on stock and produce exchanges are pure gambling. A moment's reflection, it would seem,) might convince such persons that a func-' tion which occupies so important a place in the mechanism of modern business must be a useful and necessary part of that mechanism but reflection seems to have little part in the intellectual equipment of the assailants of organized markets. Only recently I picked up a book purporting to treat of the subject of ethics, and found this remarkable passage :

“If, instead of betting on something so small as falling dice, one bets on the rise and fall of stocks