Finance means constructive work. It means mobilizing and organizing the wealth of the country so that the scattered monetary resources of the individuals may be united and guided into a mighty current of fruitful co-operation--a hundredfold, nay ten-thousandfold as potent as they would or could be in individual hands. Finance means promoting and facilitating the country's trade at home and abroad, creating new wealth, making new jobs for workmen. It means continuous study of the conditions prevailing throughout the world. It means daring and imagination combined with care and foresight and integrity, and hard, wearing work--much of it not compensated, because of every ten propositions submitted to the scrutiny or evolved by the brain of the financier who is duly careful of his reputation and conscious of his responsibility to the public, it is safe to say that not more than three materialize. For the financial offspring of which he acknowledges parentage, or merely godfathership, he is held responsible by the public for better or for worse, and will continue to be held responsible notwithstanding certain ill-advised provisions of the recently enacted Clayton Anti-Trust Act which are bound to make it more difficult for him to discharge that responsibility. Amongst other functions and duties, it is "up to him" to look ahead, so that such offspring may always be provided with nouriture, _i.e._, with funds to conduct their business. If for one reason or another they find themselves short of means in difficult times, it is his task and care to find ways and means to obtain what is needed, sometimes at great financial risk to himself. It is perhaps significant that almost all the railroad companies now in receivers' hands were among those for whose financial policy no one amongst the leading banking houses had a continuous and recognized responsibility, though I must not be understood as meaning to suggest that there were not other contributory causes for such receivership, involving responsibility and blame, amongst others, also on members of the banking fraternity. II Without going into shades of encyclopedic meaning, I would define, for the purpose of this discussion, a financier as a man who has some recognized relation and responsibility toward the larger monetary affairs of the public, either by administering deposits and loaning funds or by being a wholesale or retail distributor of securities. To all such the confidence of the financial community, which naturally knows them best, and of the investing public is absolutely vital. Without it, they simply cannot live.