STOCK SPECULATION--DANGERS AND BENEFITS 143
the industrial field, similar leaders successfully capitalized the
future conditions of demand by creating vast industrial units.
From its foundation to the present day, America has been
preeminently the nation of the pioneer and the trail-blazer. Its
present wealth has been mainly due to bold and yet wisely con-
ceived and skilfully executed speculation, rather than such uni-
versal thrift and saving as characterizes France and other
continental nations. It is after this unparalleled historic record
of national energy, foresight, and speculation in almost every
manner of business that the American public, with that mental
capriciousness which is at once the admiration and despair of
those who seek to serve it, solemnly shudders and condemns
“speculation” as an innate and quite unnecessary piece of
wickedness! For once we would do better to consider the
words of the German economist Cohn, who said that specula-
tion is in reality “the struggle of intelligence, armed with a
knowledge of the ascertainable conditions, against the blind
workings of fate.”
A Socialist’s Testimony Regarding Speculation.—Unex-
pectedly enough, the necessity of speculation is confirmed even
by the ablest socialistic thinkers, such as P. J. Proudhon, the
“Father of Anarchism,” who declared :%*
Speculation is nothing else than the intellectual conception of the
different ways in which labor, credit, transportation and exchange can
unite in production. It is speculation which discovers riches, which
invests the most economical means of securing them, and which multi-
plies them by new forms or combinations of credit, transportation,
circulation, and exchange by creating new wants or by the incessant
redistribution of fortunes.
Consistent socialists object to private property, either abso-
lutely or relatively, but they realize quite clearly that so long as
we have private property, speculation in it will occur. This is
not the place to ask our socialist friends exactly how in their
nebulous superstate of the future the risks of industry will be
¥ See Manuel du Speculateur 4 la Bourse (Paris, 1854).
