484 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
or less degree suffering and privation among these large masses must
ensue.
Now go a step further, and we find that the managers of these
railways, mines and factories are in turn dependent—wholly depend-
ent upon capital. They cannot go ahead with the extensions and
improvements necessary to efficiency without borrowing money; and
credit, in turn, will not come to their support unless a broad market
is provided, through the Stock Exchange, for the securities which
represent these obligations. Hence we see that just as every farmer
in the West and every cotton-grower in the South must have a stable
market for his products, so every laborer in our great industrial
field is directly concerned with the maintenance of a stable market for
the securities of the company that employs him. The interests of
one are the interests of all, and speculation, in one form or another,
underlies all industrial progress.
From the previously recited fact *° that the Stock Exchange
stabilizes the flow of capital into industry, it follows that it like-
wise is an indirect but powerful force in stabilizing the condi-
tions of employment, and thus performing a genuine though
little recognized service to the laboring man.
It would also be well for the Stock Exchange member to
realize that his own organization is historically descended from
the medieval guilds, and is in certain respects a species of
labor union today. Stock Exchange members cannot condemn
limited hours of work, minimum wages or commissions, central
gratuity funds, limited membership, collective bargaining, and
several other familiar features of the laboring man’s trade
union, without condemning themselves. Similarly, it may be
surprising to the unionized laboring man that there is in the
very heart of capitalistic Wall Street an old and not insig-
nificant institution to which these things are the regular and
accented rules of daily business.
The Worker as an Investor.—In addition, the employed
classes are rapidly becoming investors. They are absorbing
small lots of stocks and bonds, and investing in other listed
securities by proxy through savings bank accounts and insur-
10 See Chapter II. p. 52.
