“In fixing my name to this report, I desire to make the reservations following: 1. With regard to incorporation, I object to recommend it for the following reasons: Hitherto, the Stock Exchange has been carried on with great success as a voluntary association, and has had a vigorous growth. It has not enjoyed a single legal privilege, yet it has thriven and the public have neglected more than one effort to establish an open market to resort to it for business, and to give it exclusive confidence. This royal commission has been sitting more than twelve months, yet no important or reliable evidence has been volunteered of a character adverse to the general practices or conduct of business on the Stock Exchange. If proof be required that the internal legislation and administration of the Stock Exchange enforce a higher standard of morality than the law can reach or enacts for the regulation of other trades, such proof is to be found in the fact that recently the committee of the Stock Exchange were assailed at law by a member whom they expelled on a charge of dishonorable conduct, the lawsuit being based on the ground that the action of the committee was not justified in law. The trial lasted seven days and proved abortive, the distinction between the standard enforced by the committee and the statutory provisions of the law not being appreciated by the special jury promiscuously selected from various trades, although quite intelligible to the judge. In maintaining this high standard the committee are compelled to go beyond the common law, binding their members to the observance of their rules and practices, even though not enforceable in a court of law. If, however, they should submit to incorporation, their rules would have to be assimilated to the law, and their freedom of action would be curtailed--results which might tend to cripple them in sustaining the standard alluded to, and operate in many ways as a hindrance to that rapidity of action which is an absolute necessity in critical times. Further, incorporation implies, in some sort, monopoly, and it remains to be proved that the public would gain by any restriction of the freedom of trade, even in stocks and shares. I adhere to the opinion expressed in 1875 by the Committee on Foreign Loans, on page 47 of their report, as follows: ‘That such a body (the Stock Exchange) can be hardly interfered with by Parliament without losing that freedom of self-government which is the only life and soul of business.’”