STOCK SPECULATION—DANGERS AND BENEFITS 135
fiction-writers, speculative losses in securities simply deprive
the individual of a part of his surplus funds, just as financial
losses arising from business or investments do. Yet such
losses only too often cause hardships, not merely to the specu-
lators themselves, but to their families and dependents, for
whose sake, perhaps, they mistakenly engaged in the risks of
speculation with inadequate knowledge of securities, of busi-
ness, or of those vast economic factors which shape prices in
all the markets of the world. Such losses by people who can
ill afford them are the real source of the considerable public
prejudice against speculation and stock exchanges, and indeed
are profoundly human and moving to any man who has been
long in Wall Street.
Furthermore, speculation is only too apt to distract the
ordinary business man from his regular work. He becomes
possessed of “an impatience to be rich, a contempt for those
slow but sure gains which are the proper reward of industry,
patience, and thrift.”** If he has a weak and vacillating char-
acter, he is always fidgeting to finger a ticker tape. Often he is
utterly ignorant of the economic currents and cross-currents to
which he is so blithely entrusting his funds. In fact, he is apt
to be the first to deny the significance of economic laws and
principles as they affect security prices, and declare cynically
that “It’s all a gamble, anyway.” Or else he will assume an
owlish wisdom and discourse, with the jargon of “the Street,”
on a nondescript lot of economic fallacies and platitudes. It is
this type of individual who almost always loses his money in
the end.
Speculation Impossible to “Abolish.”—Because of the all
too frequent losses which men suffer by overtrading which
they cannot afford, and also because of the deteriorating effect
of speculation on weak and shallow natures, many honest and
sincere, but short-sighted and hasty, people rush to the con-
clusion that speculation and speculative markets should be
"16 Macaulay, “History of England.” Ch. XIX.
