Loading ...INTRODUCTORY
Stocks and shares are a matter of interest to all, and of bewilderment to most, of civilized humanity. The interest may be indirect and unrecognized. The salaried official may flatter himself, perhaps,
that because he draws an income direct from Government he is beyond the reach of the influence of stock markets and their movements, and need give no heed, to their ebullitions and vagaries; but a debauch of riotous speculation, organized in mere lightness of heart by the free-booters of the New York Stock exchange, may have consequences which will affect the prices of goods which are necessary to his existence. Modern industry is so closely knit by the quickness and cheapness of news and transport, and depends so much for its efficiency on the facilities and conveniences that are given to it by the stock markets, that the ups and downs of Capel Court and Wall Street have an influence, generally unsuspected by those affected, alike in the palace and the cottage. They go still further, and disturb the repose of nature. A rising market in rubber shares will lead to perturbation and alarm among the birds and beasts of unpenetrated tropical forests, by the sudden appearance of a number of strange, two-legged interlopers, tapping trees, clearing paths, building huts, lighting fires, and otherwise making themselves unpleasant. A syndicate lately formed in London to prospect for doubloons in the ribs of a Spanish galleon, alleged to have been wrecked on the Cornish coast, is inevitably, with its pumping and diving, causing much disturbance and debate among the shrimps and crabs of Dollar Cove.
Bewilderment on the subject of stocks and shares and their prices and fluctuations is nearly as general as their influence. The average unmathematical schoolboy who has struggled through the arithmetic book with the same sort of tolerant disgust that he feels for a French lesson, generally gives the business up in despair when he arrives at “stocks.” Hitherto, he will admit, there have been occasional glimmerings of sense in it. Problems about the time that it will take two men to pump out a cistern, or how much it will cost to paper a room, have more or less relation with the facts of life, and may even possess a certain sordid interest to a utilitarian mind. But these incredible things called stocks, in which folk deal on terms that ought only to be possible in Bedlam, selling £100 stock for £83 — M How can it be £100 stock,” our young friend will ask, ” if you only sell it for £83?” — are matters before which the most intrepid imagination quails. Then there is the commission that always complicates the problem, that beggarly one-eighth per cent, that is so clearly an arithmetical fiction, because no one could possibly live on it, much less keep motors on it as many stockbrokers in real life obviously do — the whole thing is dismissed as a quagmire of foolishness.
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