Such seems to me a fair summary of the psychology of gambling, and I do not see how its ravages are to be stayed, the disease eliminated from society, without radical changes in its structure implying loss of privilege and an abatement of class selfishness by the few who now stand apart, the nation’s drones and hive-harriers, or without the cultivation of higher ideals than those implied in mere purse-proud social emulation. And of one thing I am sure; the London Stock Exchange can do little or nothing to check the ravages of this social canker, nothing effectual can be done in any Stock Exchange of them all. To expect bodies of men, associated together for purposes of gain, in the conduct of their daily business to lay down self-denying rules for their conduct, is not merely unwise but futile. The more the organised groups of stock-jobbers and brokers doing business at particular centres called Stock Exchanges hemmed themselves in by restrictions established with a view to limit the facilities for play, for buying and selling, the more such business would be thrown into the hands of irresponsible outsiders, most, if not all, of whom are mere vultures and cormorants, devourers of the substance of all who fall into their hands. In a very real sense the saying is just that the less restricted, within well-regulated limits, the constituted market may be the greater is the safety of the public from fraud and loss. Often when the London Stock Exchange, by far the most powerful and best organised institution of the kind in the world, has attempted to bar the way to the mere speculator in certain directions it has been defeated. It refused many years ago to sanction dealings before allotment, that is to say, purchases and sales of a security before it was really in the hands of the market or the public. The dealings went on all the same, until the liberty had to be restored. Unto this hour many members of the “House,” as the Stock Exchange is affectionately called by its members, set their faces against gambling in “options”—against, that is, the system of play by which a speculator puts down so much money, parts with it for good, in exchange for the right to “call” for the delivery, or to give delivery, of a certain specified amount of a particular security—to “put,” the slang is—on a certain future day at a price fixed when the transaction is entered into. But this kind of pure betting business grows every year all the same, and is now of a magnitude an Act of Parliament could hardly do much to lessen. Against the force of human passions no Stock Exchange can hope to war with success, and I do not believe that any such body should be asked to impose self-denying ordinances upon itself, the only effect of which would be to drive the business away from it into channels more fertile still in ruin.