By this means modern nations not only stimulated their manufacturing industries, awoke and encouraged inventiveness, spread their productions over the whole world, but developed cities at home and made life bearable for aggregates of population whose healthy existence would have been impossible under the conditions prevalent, say, at the close of the Napoleonic wars and for long after. Many other forces doubtless were at work so far as England alone is concerned—wealth drawn from India, the tireless energy of the race, the backwardness of other nations—but it was in no small measure the impetus supplied by those portions of our otherwise intolerable National Debt, utilised as a means of creating credit through our banks, that the resources and energies of the nation, and such forces as it drew from the yearly accretions of its savings, the ever-increasing fruition of its accomplished enterprises, were given full scope. In this development the Stock Exchange played a leading part. Without it as intermediary, little progress could have been made. Human nature rather than the share market must therefore be blamed for the manias and delirious gambling by which every step in the triumph of man over the forces of nature, of time and space, has been accompanied. The younger generation does not remember the days of the railway mania, when men went demented over wild and hopeless-looking projects, and rushed worthless shares to fantastic premiums in the height of the disease; but amid that insanity the warp and woof of our present network of roads came into being. There were enormous losses inflicted upon the multitude by the collapse, the always inevitable collapse; but good work was none the less done, progress made. Again, I may say, had the masses of mankind been capable of obeying high ideals, all this could have been avoided. It is possible to conceive a state governed by a spirit of mutual help and wholesome brotherliness in citizenship, wherein all would have been united according to their means to build these new iron highways for the good of the whole community, not for private gain; but it is vanity to think thoughts like these, men being what they are. The one effective force that could be relied on to attract the necessary capital to any enterprise is cupidity in one degree or another, the desire for individual profit. It may be the restrained and wholesome acquisitiveness of the man who merely seeks a safe repository for the fruits of his thrift, but more often it is the greed which cherishes the desire and hope of excessive and untoiled-for profit.