STOCK SPECULATION—DANGERS AND BENEFITS 129 
the dealer in sugar. Like the latter, the stock speculator buys 
and sells at his own risk with the aim of making a profit, and 
plays a similar part in distributing securities among investors. 
The fact that the stock market, because of the nature of 
the property in which it deals, must necessarily serve as a mar- 
ket for resales, does not alter this function of the speculator 
as a security distributor. 
Economic Education and Progress.—Unfortunately, how- 
aver, the economic education of the public has been very slow, 
while the evolution of our organized markets, particularly dur- 
ing the past half-century, has been extraordinarily swift. The 
paradoxical result is that the general public, although living by 
means of the economic institutions of today, frequently thinks 
in terms of an economic America which no longer exists. This 
is particularly true in respect to the whole general subject of 
distribution. 
[n consequence, the public is only too apt to mistake super- 
ficial and incidental differences between the modern organized 
exchange and the older and more familiar unorganized type of 
market for fundamental and basic differences, and to criticize 
and suspect the former because it does not conform in the 
details of its operation to the methods customary in the latter. 
Thus, through ignorance or misunderstanding of the system 
for clearing contracts in vogue in all the modern exchanges, 
some appear to think that speculation for small profits which is 
accompanied by a frequent clearance of intermediate contracts,’ 
amounts to gambling, because there is no precedent for such a 
practice in the older unorganized markets. 
Speculation in securities on the Stock Exchange of today, 
therefore, must be judged by its conformity in fundamental 
economic principle rather than in technical mode of operation, 
with speculation in other and less highly organized markets. 
Moreover, the actual modus operandi of the present Stock 
Exchange must be carefully studied before any intelligent con- 
"4 See Chapter VIII, p. 205.