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management and dividend-earning power, will 
mainly determine the course which it will take. 
So soon, however, as* an investment has settled 
down in its proper sphere, external influences 
will prove to be its main controlling force. 
In the same manner as a new stock has 
thus to pass through a period of financial 
infancy, so have the stocks in a country which 
suddenly adopts the unfamiliar workings of 
the system of Joint Stock enterprise. 
When Joint Stock Companies were intro 
duced into England, the newly created stocks 
and shares developed the most extraordinary 
and erratic price-movements, which resulted in 
a final crash, historically known as the bursting 
of the South Sea Bubble ; although the South 
Sea Company was only one of the hundreds of 
concerns which simultaneously collapsed at 
that time. A similarly baseless wave of 
inflation, though on a much more modest scale, 
was recently observable in Japan when the 
Joint Stock principle was introduced into that 
country in 1890. Indeed, it was only in the 
year 1899, after nine years’ experience of Stock 
Exchange fluctuation, that a normal course of 
price-movement began to display itself in 
Japanese stocks. 
A representative specimen of the indis 
criminate fluctuations which were at first