Perhaps the Stock Exchange is unworthy enough to be defined as the bottomless pit, and to be described as worse than all the hells, if we look at the mere market from the point of view of those who abuse the facilities which it offers for free dealing--but only from that point of view. Without the Stock Exchange our commercial and industrial life could never have attained its modern refinements. Indirectly this institution provides the sinews of industry and commerce, or, at all events, that one great sinew, capital. The inventor with an idea to develop, the trader with a business to expand, the pioneer with a country to explore, the Government with a scheme to finance, all betake themselves eventually to the Stock Exchange.
It is the organisation of capital for speculation and investment, even as the banks are the organisation of capital for loans. Its members are in close touch with all the capitalist investors and speculators in the country, and can lay any scheme for which the financial sinews are required before them. Moreover, in providing a free market for the securities upon which the money is subscribed, the Stock Exchange tempts subscriptions, and indeed renders them possible where otherwise they might not be. Most people would hesitate to part with their money in exchange for even the best securities, did they not feel assured that, if necessity arose, they could readily obtain its return by selling the security in the free market which the Stock Exchange affords. But for the Stock Exchange, even the Government would find a difficulty in borrowing; whilst great schemes, national, commercial, and industrial, would languish in the lack of a ready flow of capital. Railways could not traverse the land nor ships the sea; enterprise would be discouraged, and the original and progressive ideas of clever men would decay undeveloped. Thus the Stock Exchange is linked closely with the prosperity of the world in general and of the nation in particular, and it has grown with the development of that prosperity.
Some very fair idea of how it has grown is obviously conveyed by a statement of the nominal value of the wares in which it deals. It is impossible to form an estimate of the whole of the enormous amount, as there are dealings in so many securities which are not recognised in the Official List of the market. But the nominal value of the securities thus quoted at the end of 1912 reached the enormous total of £10,990,249,126; this comparing with £8,787,316,406 in 1902, an increase of £2,202,932,720, or no less than 25 per cent. In other words, the amount of securities officially quoted in the Stock Exchange is one-quarter larger than it was a decade ago.