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management  and  dividend-earning  power,  will
mainly  determine  the  course  which  it  will  take.
So  soon,  however,  as*  an  investment  has  settled
down  in  its  proper  sphere,  external  influences
will  prove  to  be  its  main  controlling  force.
In  the  same  manner  as  a  new  stock  has
thus  to  pass  through  a  period  of  financial
infancy,  so  have  the  stocks  in  a  country  which
suddenly  adopts  the  unfamiliar  workings  of
the  system  of  Joint  Stock  enterprise.
When  Joint  Stock  Companies  were  introduced ­
  into  England,  the  newly  created  stocks
and  shares  developed  the  most  extraordinary
and  erratic  price-movements,  which  resulted  in
a  final  crash,  historically  known  as  the  bursting
of  the  South  Sea  Bubble  ;  although  the  South
Sea  Company  was  only  one  of  the  hundreds  of
concerns  which  simultaneously  collapsed  at
that  time.  A  similarly  baseless  wave  of
inflation,  though  on  a  much  more  modest  scale,
was  recently  observable  in  Japan  when  the
Joint  Stock  principle  was  introduced  into  that
country  in  1890.  Indeed,  it  was  only  in  the
year  1899,  after  nine  years’  experience  of  Stock
Exchange  fluctuation,  that  a  normal  course  of
price-movement  began  to  display  itself  in
Japanese  stocks.
A  representative  specimen  of  the  indiscriminate ­
  fluctuations  which  were  at  first