AN EPOCH-MAKING VOYAGE AND ITS EFFECT UPON A EUROPEAN WAR-CLOUD. London has been treated to so many surprises in United States finance, that the events of the first six months of 1895 were at first received as merely fresh proof of the rule that it is the unexpected which always happens in American monetary affairs. The New York stock market is placed by most Londoners in the “city” in the same category with French politics. The safest prophecy in either field can be made by studying the situation with the greatest care, and then by forecasting in exactly the opposite direction to the dictates of one’s judgment. A booming stock market and cheap money in the face of industrial depression and commercial disaster were regarded with wonder and amazement by the Solons of Capel Court and Throgmorton Street. They could not account for the paradox, and they finally gave up trying. London had been among the first to unload its American stocks during what was believed to be a temporary rise in the early winter. Now in midsummer following she was disgusted and even indignant when she read quotations many points higher than the low prices at which she had closed her losing speculations. None of the rules of finance would fit the situation. All the laws of trade seemed defied. But London now was merely a spectator. She possessed none of the abnormally high-priced securities. She was quite sincere in saying she didn’t want any at prevailing quotations. She was more inclined to be tempted by new enterprises, industrials, railroads, and the like, which looked cheap. But all “Americans” were still under the ban. London had suffered too much in the past five years to forget, and London memories are longer than those of her transatlantic cousins. Gold had been flowing eastward in a steady stream for six months, and Europe could not understand how America could endure the drain. Nearly $50,000,000 in bullion, it was calculated, had been received by the Bank of England and the Bank of France from New York, and practically none had gone in the opposite direction. Two years before, when the same thing happened on a somewhat smaller scale, America had suffered a veritable panic. Silver and its advocates had been held solely responsible for this panic, but it had not alone been America’s attempt to resist the world’s decree of monetary dethronement against the white metal which had driven away gold and brought domestic disaster. But the usual penalties of national loss of gold were entirely absent now, and European financiers were more than puzzled by it.