There are many popular delusions outside the ranks of the clergy connected with the effort to form a correct estimate of Wall Street affairs by the general public. It is a popular delusion that it is a place where people who are in the “ring” take something for nothing. No idea could be further wide of the mark in regard to Wall Street men as a class, however true it may be of some individual instances, as in other departments of business. Wall Street gives full value for everything it receives, and the country at large is deeply its debtor. Some people may think this a paradox, but there is nothing more easily demonstrated to those who have observed the commercial and industrial progress of the country and the age. Wall Street has furnished the money that has set the wheels of industry in motion over the vast continent, and in one century has brought us abreast, in the industrial arts, of countries that had from one to two thousand years the start of us. In this respect it has assisted nobly to carry out the ideas of the fathers of the Constitution. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Hamilton laid down the doctrine that it would be a betrayal of the interests of posterity to limit the productive energies of this country to raw material. With our present experience we may think it strange that this question should ever have been debated, but it was, even after the old tyranny had been obliged to loosen its grasp on the struggling enterprise of the young Republic. Our old revolutionary sires deserve credit for their foresight, but what would have been the fate of their commercial philosophy if Wall Street had not supplied the sinews of war to cope with the forces of nature, to work our mines and build our railroads, and through these and other means, to attract the teeming population from every clime to cultivate our virgin soil and develop our wonderful industries and resources? Apropos of the above observations, I may add that during the debate in the British Parliament, on the recognition of the Confederacy, the great manufacturing power in our industrial, financial and commercial progress was clearly exhibited and thoroughly appreciated by British statesmen. It was made one of the strongest arguments, too, by some of the representatives of our jealous and envious cousins on the other side of the “pond,” why Great Britain should recognize and aid the South in the war. Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, at present the leader of the Tory party in England, and the advocate of twenty years’ coercion for Ireland, was one of the bitterest foes of the Union, chiefly on this account. He was one of the Vice-Presidents of the “Southern Independent Association,” for the promotion of the cause of the Rebellion, and for supplying the Confederates with money and arms, and for the ultimate object of founding an empire of slavery on this continent.