securities, actually and collectively they constitute a national institution of great importance and great power for good or ill.

They are officers of the court of commerce in the same sense in which lawyers are officers of the court of law. They should not be satisfied with things as they find them, they should not take the way of least resistance, they should ever seek to broaden their own outlook and extend the field and scope of the Stock Exchange's activities.

One of the reasons for London's financial world position is that its American opportunity for foreign tradeStock Exchange affords a market for all kinds of securities of all kinds of countries. The English Stock Broker's outlook and general or detailed information range over the entire inhabited globe. It is largely through him that the investing or speculative public is kept advised as to opportunities for placing funds in foreign countries. He is an active and valuable force in gathering and spreading information and in enlisting British capital on its world-wide mission.

The viewpoint of the average American investor is as yet rather a narrow one. Investment in foreign countries is not much to his liking. The regions too far removed from Broadway do not greatly appeal to him as fields for financial fructification.

Yet, if America is to avail herself fully of the opportunities for her trade which the world offers, she must be prepared to open her markets to foreign securities, both bonds and stocks.

If America aspires to an economic world position similar to England's, she must have amongst other things financial [such as, first of all, a discount market] a market for foreign securities.

In educating first themselves and then the public to an appreciation of the importance and attractiveness of such a market, with due regard to safety, and to the prior claim of American enterprise in its own country, the members of the Stock Exchange have an immense field for their imagination, their desire for knowledge and their energy.

We are at a turning point in American History We all of us must try to adjust our viewpoint to the situation which the war has created for America, and to the consequences which will spring from that situation after the war will have ceased.

As Mr. Vanderlip so well said in a recent speech: "Never did a nation have flung at it so many gifts of opportunity, such inspiration for achievement. We are like the heir of an enormously wealthy father. None too well trained, none too experienced, with the pleasure-loving qualities of youth, we have suddenly, by a world tragedy, been made heir to the greatest estate of opportunity that imagination ever pictured."

America is in a period which for good or ill is a turning point in her history. Her duty and her responsibility are equally as great as her opportunity. Shall we rise to its full potentiality, both in a material and in a moral sense?

The words of an English poet come to my mind:

It is not "craven fear" that will prevent us from attaining the summit of the greatness which it is open to America to reach, for fear has never kept back Americans—‌any more than Englishmen—‌and never will.

Indifference, slackness and sloth, lack of breadth and depth in thought and planning; the softening of our fibre through easy prosperity and luxury; unwise or hampering laws, inadequacy of vision and of purposeful, determined effort, individual and national, are what we have to guard against.

God grant America may not fail to grasp and hold that greatness which lies at her hand!

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE AND PUBLIC