496 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE 
could it have developed either a city or rural life at all com- 
parable to modern conditions in town and country. Thus, 
many of the agitators who declaim loudest against the present 
economic scheme of things could not have long drawn the 
breath of life in this world, had their birth and upbringing 
occurred under those very economic conditions of which they 
are the incessant advocates. 
The Rising Standard of Living.—But there is another 
side to this profound service rendered to the average human 
being by scientific invention, quantity production, speculative 
distribution, and the modern machinery of credit in which the 
Stock Exchange is so integral a factor. Not only can more 
people live under these conditions, but the standards of living 
of the average human being have been vastly improved by the 
flood of goods produced by capitalism. Not only the necessi- 
ties of life, but comforts and luxuries of whose very existence 
the most wealthy and powerful men in the past never dreamed, 
have through our factories, our banks, and our stock exchanges, 
been placed within the reach of practically everyone. In order 
to get a more vivid and accurate sense of the significance of 
this economic tendency, it may not be out of place here to note 
briefly certain differences between the daily life of a mediaeval 
baron on the one hand, and that of a very plain modern citizen 
—say a haberdasher’s clerk—on the other. 
The baron, for all his jewels, wore coarse hand-made clothes 
dyed roughly and in few colors. His palace knew no light 
except candles and torches and no heat except that of open log 
fires. His food was extremely monotonous, and all the long 
winter consisted mainly of salted fish and salted meat, with no 
vegetables or fruit. Hence, contemporary poets hailed “the 
sweet spring” with no little enthusiasm. Sugar was a rare 
oriental luxury; tea and coffee were unknown. Even the com- 
monest spices were distinct luxuries and were laboriously 
brought into Europe by caravan from Asia and sold at extra- 
ordinary prices.