It is of great and urgent importance that the Stock Exchange should leave nothing undone to get itself better and more correctly understood. It should not only not avoid the fullest publicity and scrutiny, but it should welcome and seek them. [Sidenote: _The Stock Exchange a National Institution_] It has nothing to hide and it should be glad to show that it has nothing to hide. It should miss no opportunity to explain patiently and in good temper what it is and stands for, to correct misunderstandings and erroneous conception. If it is attacked from any quarter deserving of attention, it should go to the trouble of defending itself. If it is made the object of calumny, it should contradict and confound the slanderer. Its members should ever remember that while in theory the Stock Exchange is merely a market for the buying and selling of securities, actually and collectively they constitute a national institution of great importance and great power for good or ill. They are officers of the court of commerce in the same sense in which lawyers are officers of the court of law. They should not be satisfied with things as they find them, they should not take the way of least resistance, they should ever seek to broaden their own outlook and extend the field and scope of the Stock Exchange's activities. [Sidenote: _American opportunity for foreign trade_] One of the reasons for London's financial world position is that its Stock Exchange affords a market for all kinds of securities of all kinds of countries. The English Stock Broker's outlook and general or detailed information range over the entire inhabited globe. It is largely through him that the investing or speculative public is kept advised as to opportunities for placing funds in foreign countries. He is an active and valuable force in gathering and spreading information and in enlisting British capital on its world-wide mission. The viewpoint of the average American investor is as yet rather a narrow one. Investment in foreign countries is not much to his liking. The regions too far removed from Broadway do not greatly appeal to him as fields for financial fructification. Yet, if America is to avail herself fully of the opportunities for her trade which the world offers, she must be prepared to open her markets to foreign securities, both bonds and stocks. If America aspires to an economic world position similar to England's, she must have amongst other things financial [such as, first of all, a discount market] a market for foreign securities. [Sidenote: _We are at a turning point in American History_] In educating first themselves and then the public to an appreciation of the importance and attractiveness of such a market, with due regard to safety, and to the prior claim of American enterprise in its own country, the members of the Stock Exchange have an immense field for their imagination, their desire for knowledge and their energy.