to be no imminent danger in such inflation, but when business slackens, as it always has periodically in the past---- However, the optimists contend that these problems are too far in the future to worry about. Furthermore it is not the design of this article to criticise abuses, or to prognosticate future difficulties that seem likely to grow out of them. It is true that some of the companies, notwithstanding the tremendous increase in their capital structures, have not weakened their resources by increasing their cash disbursements. In 1921 the stock of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was paying $5 a year in dividends and selling at $124.50 per share. In 1922 it was boosted up to $250.50 a share on the report that shareholders were to receive four new shares for one. After this split-up was accomplished and the authorized common stock increased to 25,000,000 shares,--not dollars, but _shares_!--more than 20,000,000 of which have been issued, in addition to $200,000,000 of preferred stock, the same conservative dividend policy was continued, and the new stock received, and still receives, only one dollar a share annually in dividends. The market price of the new stock went down to a fraction below $31, whence it afterwards recovered to about $46, at which figure it pays a trifle over 2%, or about one half the net return on U. S. Government bonds; and the only visible change in the stockholder’s position is that if he wishes to sell his stock it costs about five times what it did before; in other words, to buy and sell the equivalent of one hundred shares of the old stock it now costs $154 in commission and tax--more than eighteen months’ income on a hundred shares of the present stock. Possibly there are mathematicians who can figure out some sort of compensating advantage to the stockholder, but I never could. * * * * * To sum up the whole situation in a word, those who would make money speculating in the stock market should first understand that it requires as much caution and business acumen as any other money-making enterprise, plus some knowledge of the psychological handicaps; also plus the rare faculty of maintaining a complete mastery over one’s impulses, emotions and ambitions under the most heroic tests of human endurance. All speculations, and even the most conservative investments, have some slight element of risk; all lines of business are more or less a gamble; marriage is a gamble; political preferment is a gamble; in fact nearly everything in life, including our very existence, is an uncertainty; yet people are not thereby discouraged from entering into any and all of these ventures. Those who look only for certainties have far to search and little to find in this world. * * * * * Transcriber’s Notes: The one footnote has been moved to the end of its chapter.