STOCK SPECULATION—DANGERS AND BENEFITS 145 
model or the scientist's discovery may seem, the financial specu- 
lator must actively intervene before they can be placed at the 
daily service of mankind. As Hirst so well says :® 
The rapid development of material resources, mining, agriculture, 
manufactures, transportation, is of necessity associated with specula- 
tion. For speculation in the best sense is the investment of capital and 
the use of credit to finance enterprises which promise to yield hand- 
some profits. But for a verdant and evergreen faith, salted with the 
love of risk and adventure for their own sakes, how could mountains 
be bored and waters bridged? If there were not superstition, there 
could be no religion; if there were no bad speculations there could be 
no good investments; if there were no wild ventures there would be 
no brilliantly successful enterprises; the same sort of sentiment which 
gave Dr. Cook a temporary notoriety invested Hansen with permanent 
fame. New York, then, must be valued fairly, not as a sort of 
gambling hell, but as a nerve center of North American enterprise. 
The Economic Value of Unsuccessful Speculation.— 
Almost all intelligently conducted experiments serve a useful 
purpose in the long run. The real invention, like the telegraph 
or the combustion engine, which is at first usually deemed only 
a “cracked inventor's dream,” provides a direct illustration of 
the value to society at large of financial speculation. But even 
failures may not be without an ultimate economic benefit. Just 
as in science there have been no striking discoveries without 
many futile experiments, so too in finance there have rarely if 
ever been great successes which have conferred services upon 
millions, without preliminary unsuccessful speculations. It 
was not until railroading on wooden rails, with sails, mules, 
and hand-cars as motive power, had been eliminated from the 
field of practical possibility by actual and costly trial that steam 
railroading on steel rails finally became a success. If the suc- 
cessful speculator is the hero of progress, the unsuccessful 
speculator is often the martyr to progress. If the Anglo-Saxon 
race had always waited for a “sure thing,” it would still be 
tending goats on the foothills of the Himalayas, instead of 
directing the destinies of most of the civilized world today. 
"= Hirst, “The Stock Exchange.” o. 244.