In the first place it does not guarantee to the small investor any security for his little hoard at all. He comes into the world of investment ill-informed, credulous or only unintelligently suspicious--and he is as a class continually and systematically deprived of his little accumulations. One great financial operation after another in the modern world, as any well-informed person can witness, eats up the small investor. Some huge, vastly respectable-looking enterprise is floated with a capital of so many scores or hundreds of thousands, divided into so many thousands of ordinary shares, so many five or six per cent. preference, so much debentures. It begins its career with a flourish of prosperity, the ordinary shares for a few years pay seven, eight, ten per cent. The Virtuous Small Man provides for his widow and his old age by buying this estimable security. Its price clambers to a premium, and so it passes slowly and steadily from its first speculative holder into the hands of the investing public. Then comes a slow, quiet, downward movement, a check at the interim dividend, a rapid contraction. Consider such a case as that of the great British Electric Traction Company which began with ordinary shares at ten, which clambered above twenty-one (21-7/8), which is now (October 1907) fluctuating about two. Its six per cent, preference shares have moved between fourteen and five and a half. Its ordinary shares represent a total capital of £1,333,010, and its preference £1,614,370; so that here in this one concern we have a phantom appearance and disappearance of over two million pounds' worth of value and a real disappearance of perhaps half that amount. It requires only a very slight knowledge of the world to convince one that the bulk of that sum was contributed by the modest investments of mediocre and small people out of touch with the real conditions of the world of finance. These little investors, it is said, are the bitter champions of private finance against the municipalities and Socialists. One wonders why. One could find a score of parallels and worse instances representing in the end many scores of millions of pounds taken from the investing public in the last few years. I will, however, content myself with one sober quotation from the New York _Journal of Commerce_, which the reader will admit is not likely to be a willing witness for Socialism. Commenting on the testimony of the principal witness, Mr. Harriman, of the Illinois Central Railroad, before the Inter-State Commerce Commission (March 1907), it says:--