STOCK EXCHANGE AN INTERNATIONAL MARKET g3j5
Future International Réle of the New York Stock Ex-
change.—In the vast international vistas of commercial and
financial development which destiny is thus opening before
our people, the New York Stock Exchange has a vital role to
play in behalf of our national future. Its free and open market
must function not only as our principal domestic securities
exchange, but also as a world market comparable in scope and
power to our new world position. We must look upon it as
an indispensable part of the national business machinery in
times of peace, and if the occasion shall arise, as a huge bul-
wark of economic and financial strength in times of war. We
are justified in feeling a sense of national pride in its rapid
growth and swift efficiency, since it so well embodies both the
level-headed sagacity and the progressive and daring enterprise
of our people.
America today enters this future period of international
financial preeminence with a confidence for the future grounded
firmly in the achievements of the present. And yet, in the
coming years, our vision must be comparable in breadth and
depth to the task which fate has set for us. The philosopher,
Edmund Burke—that true friend of American political des-
tinies—once declared, “Great empires and little minds go ill
together.” If this is true of the governmental problems of
empires, it is a hundred times truer of the present and future
“empires of business.” The United States has entered its
economic maturity. We have ceased, once and for all, to be a
parochial nation on the fringes of modern civilization, nor can
we longer judge our economic problems simply with the out-
look and the philosophy of the impoverished country villager.
We should, with regard to the future of this country, have
something of the spirit and viewpoint of the British poet who
said concerning his own people:
We've sailed wherever ships can sail
We've founded many a mighty state,
God grant our greatness may not stale
Through craven fear of being great.
